This is the same walkthrough we do with every new operator, written down. Follow it top to bottom and you go from an empty account to taking paid bookings on your own website, tonight. Nothing here needs a developer.
No credit card needed. Nothing to install. Nothing to cancel.
Open Items in the sidebar and hit + Add item. The form asks for exactly what a customer needs to book: a name, a short description, the price per day, and how many you own. That last one matters. Own two Disco Domes? Put 2, and PartyOps lets two different customers book one each for the same Saturday, then stops a third.
The photo is where it gets nice. Pick any picture off your phone and a cropper opens before anything uploads: ratio presets, drag to reposition, scroll to zoom, a rule-of-thirds grid to line the shot up. It compresses everything automatically so your booking page loads fast on a customer's phone at the school gate. Change your mind later? Hover the photo and hit Re-crop, no need to find the original.
Most operators do not really charge per day, they charge for the weekend. So PartyOps has a setting for exactly that. Turn on Listed price covers a minimum number of days, and your listed price becomes a base price. Say it covers 2 days with a €70 extra-day fee: a €300 listing costs €300 for one or two days, €370 for three, €440 for four. Saturday to Sunday is never charged as two full days again.
Busy periods get their own tool. Peak date surcharges let you add a flat extra for bank holiday weekends, communion season, Halloween week, whatever your busy stretch is. The customer sees it as its own line before they pay, so there is no awkward conversation later.
Changing a price is just editing the item, any time, from your phone. Already have prices on your own website? A tiny script keeps them synced from PartyOps, so you update a price once and it changes everywhere.
This is the part operators tell us pays for itself. Online booking is only good if it books the way you would book, so PartyOps gives you the same judgement calls you make on the phone, as settings.
Buffer days block days around every booking so you have time to collect, clean and set up between hires. Set it to 1 and a Saturday hire automatically blocks Friday and Sunday for that unit, so nobody books it out from under your van run. Your own manual bookings ignore the buffer, it only applies to what customers can book online.
And for holidays or a unit that came back needing a repair, Blocked dates closes off any date range for one item, or the whole business. One dropdown literally says All items (close whole business). Christmas sorted in ten seconds.
Pick one of two modes, and switch between them any time without losing your setup. By area: build a list of the towns you serve, each with its own charge. Customers pick their town from a dropdown and the fee is added automatically. Got the list in a spreadsheet already? Paste the whole thing into the bulk importer, up to 500 lines, and re-pasting later updates prices instead of duplicating rows.
By distance: enter your base Eircode and set bands, like free up to 15 km, €20 to 30 km, €40 to 50 km. The customer types their Eircode, we measure the distance from your base on our servers, and the right charge appears before they pay. Nobody can type a closer address to dodge the fee.
You know the questions that save a wasted trip. Grass or concrete? Is there a socket within reach? What floor is it going to? Add them once in Booking flow and every customer answers them at booking, not in a phone call the night before. Answers are saved on the booking and land in your new-booking email.
Your terms get the same treatment. Paste them into Settings, or link to the terms page on your own site, and customers must tick the box before they can book. Enforced on our servers, not just in the browser, so there is no way around it. The night-before cancellation argument now has a paper trail.
The Embed page gives you a single line of code and a copy button. Paste it into any page of your existing website and your branded booking form appears right there, loaded in its own frame so it cannot break your site's styling. The page even walks you through it in four steps: log into your CMS, edit the page, paste, publish.
That is the entire integration. If you can paste, you can go live. And if you would rather not touch it at all, we will do it with you on a call.
<script src="https://partyops.app/widget.js"
data-business-id="your-business-id"></script>Here is where every setting you just made quietly does its job. Your customer picks an item, picks dates on a calendar where taken days are already painted red, and the price builds itself in front of them: base price, extra days, delivery worked out from their Eircode, any peak surcharge, and the deposit split. All calculated on our servers from your rules, never in their browser.
The awkward cases come out polite. Dates inside your short-notice window get "give us a ring" with your number. Areas you do not serve get a nudge to call, not a dead end. And nobody, ever, books a unit that is already out.
When a booking lands you get an email with everything on it: dates, address, Eircode, your questions answered, delivery fee, surcharge, deposit paid and balance due. The customer gets a branded confirmation with the same numbers. In the Bookings screen, new requests sit under a New tab with a one-click Confirm, and confirming is what sends the customer their confirmation email when you are in review mode.
The deposit and balance loop is done properly. The booking shows deposit paid in green and balance owed in amber, and it never shows a deposit as paid in full anywhere. When the balance is due, hit Generate payment link and text it over, a Stripe link tied to that exact balance. Paid by cash or transfer on the day instead? Record the method with one click and the numbers reconcile themselves.
And that is the whole system. Your customer list, revenue dashboard and calendar build themselves from here on. The first Saturday a booking arrives, pays its deposit and confirms itself while you are out on a delivery run is the moment it clicks.
Most of what makes PartyOps good is invisible. Here is some of it anyway.
Availability is checked and locked at the database in a single step. Two customers cannot win the same unit for the same day, even booking at the same second.
Someone half-fills the form and wanders off? Their pending booking only holds the dates for 30 minutes, then they open up again.
Eircode distances are measured on our servers from your base, so nobody can type a closer address to dodge the delivery fee.
If two peak-date ranges overlap, the customer pays the higher one, once. It is spelled out in their confirmation email too.
Generating a fresh balance link automatically kills the old one, so a customer can never accidentally pay the same balance twice.
Every business is fully isolated with row-level security. GDPR-friendly, daily backups, and your customers are never marketed to by anyone else.
Confirmations and alerts are claimed atomically before sending, so nobody ever gets the same email twice, even if systems hiccup.
Dates are pinned to Irish time on our servers, so an 11pm Saturday booking is never told that tomorrow is in the past.
If a price changes mid-checkout, the booking is stopped and the customer is asked to refresh. Nobody ever pays an out-of-date price.
Everything above works on the free plan, today, with no card needed. Or if you would rather we set it up with you, drop us a line and we will do the whole thing together on a call.