I posted a brief video tutorial on Calendar Sync last week, but I want to follow that up with some broader context.  Specifically, I’d like to share with you our broader vision for calendar sync and by extension the Finch platform.  And I also want to give you a glimpse of what’s in the near-future for this feature set and talk about how we decided to phase things the way we did. 

So let’s dive in…

Our stated mission is to become the system of record for business travel.  Fundamentally what that means is we would be the place where anyone in the company would get information about trips - past, present and future.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that folks need to log in to Finch to get that information. 

Part of being the ‘system of record’ means that you also expose all of that information to downstream systems or ‘meet people where they are’ in the systems they are used to.  Architecturally that means building an open system that is ready, willing, and able to integrate to share its data with other systems large and small.

Sharing is essentially what Calendar Sync really is. 

It’s using the information in a trip plan—whether it’s the dates of the trip or the details of a block—and creating meeting invites that integrate to your calendar.  Sounds simple enough, but there’s some powerful magic behind that. 

It means that casual users, clients, or external users never need to log in.  They just receive an invite as they would for any other meeting(s).  But for those who need quick access to the full trip, we provide the deep link to the trip in the calendar event. 

For us, ‘meeting people where they are’—and in this case it’s their calendars—is a fundamental principle.  As we get better at these kinds of use cases, we will extend that principle to more functions, like sending data to a data warehouse for enterprise reporting, integrating with your messaging platform of choice to create team or channel chats, or flowing expense details to your accounts payable system. 

We’re only getting started. And even on this feature set alone, we have more things coming soon. 

For example, today the invite comes from our generic Finch Organiser account.  The reason why we did this was because it’s the fastest way to implement calendar integration and therefore the best way to provide value to users quickly.  In addition, we decided not to do the RSS feed style integration (which means automatically adding it to your calendar via a subscription rather than sending a meeting invite). 

Why?  Because we felt those RSS feeds are too geared towards individuals.  Group planning and trip management requires people to be notified that something has been planned.  And if the organiser plans something, we want the calendar sync to ‘trigger’ a notification. 

In addition, we heard from a lot of people that they want to understand RSVPs.  It’s all well and good to plan something, but what if no one is going to come?  This basic concept - of sending a meeting invite that someone can accept or reject - is a key contrast to other tools.  Again, we see ourselves as crucial to the planning of a trip, not just a compilation of the bookings.

What's Next?

But next up, is that we will roll out a feature called ‘connected accounts’ where users in a workspace can authorise their calendar to be connected such that meeting invites will be sent from their calendar directly rather than Finch Organiser.  This will be part of our paid workspace plans which we’ll be rolling out towards the end of this quarter. 

Today, if you are all on Google Calendar, you can see who has accepted or rejected, but the organiser does not get notifications.  Instead our general Finch Organiser account gets all of the replies. 

When we roll-out connected accounts, the organiser can stay immediately on top of RSVPs in their inbox, without even needing to login to Finch.  Not only that, but for those groups looking to use this to schedule a client workshop or customer event, you won’t need to explain what Finch is and make customers set-up an account.  They will just get meeting invites as if they were coming from the marketing team or their account manager.

We’d love to hear from you. 

What systems or tools would you find it valuable for us to integrate with next?  How else would you like to see Calendar Sync improved as we further iterate on v1?  Set up time to chat here, or contact me at steve@finch.travel. I'd love to hear from you.