What are automatic events?

Automatic events are regular events that ManageMyMatch will automatically create and book, managing the events workflow itself. In effect it is doing the job of an Event administrator and Event organiser.

Here's how it works: Every night, at 11pm, ManageMyMatch will action any event whose series has been marked by the Events Manager as "Automatically rollover single day events".

What this means is that ManageMyMatch will manage the workflow of regular events so long as each event happens on one day only. This is often the case, for example a monthly club night.

The following actions are performed for each automated series:

1.  ManageMyMatch takes the day beyond the member booking horizon (e.g. 2 or 3 weeks from now) and checks to see if that day is a relevant day to book a new event in the series (See this article to understand how this is scheduled). If it is, then a new event is created (and set in the pending stage) for that day and courts are booked as per the court set that has been linked to the event as described in this article.
2. If there is an event in the in play stage that has past its date of play (i.e. occurred today), that event is moved to completed stage (which in turn will shunt any event already in completed stage into archived stage).
3. If there is an event in open stage that is due to start tomorrow it is moved into in play stage
4. If, as a result of 3 above, there is no longer an event in open stage the next one in pending stage is moved to the open stage

In effect, this arrangement ensures that the next event is open for members to sign up to at the earliest opportunity and are only moved into in play stage on the day of play.

If the event attracts a fee then note the following:

• Once the event is in the in play stage joiners cannot retract from the fee. They can still sign out of the event, but given that they would be doing so on the day of the event this will still be charged. This arrangement ensures some level of commitment from joiners so as to justify the bookings and trouble officials will have gone to to support the event.
• Joiners will be charged for an event when the event is moved into the completed stage. This is always the case for fee-attracting events and has the same behaviour for manually managed events.

ManageMyMatch sends messages to certain individuals to keep them informed of its actions as above as follows:

• Any event administrators for the series are messaged each time a new event is created as per step 1 above. Event administrators can be set up on the series by either another event administrator or by an Event manager.
• The Bookings manager is messaged upon successful block booking of future courts for the event. If any court cannot be booked because it is already booked out for some other reason, then no courts are booked and a message to this effect will also be sent to the Bookings manager. In such a case, bookings for the event will then have to be done manually. Any club official can actually elect to get these messages by ticking the "Notify me when the system automatically block books regular events" box within the Club officials panel in My clubs. The Bookings manager would have been expected to have ticked this already. See this article for more details.