Recal Core Concepts - Organizations, Users & Calendar Events

Quick Overview

🗂️ Organizations: An Organization is a way to group users. Think of it as a folder or a container. When you sign up for Recal, you get a main organization, and you can create additional organizations inside it. We refer to them as sub-organizations. Suborgs can have custom slugs (/name) that correspond with your database for easier integration. This structure is useful for two main scenarios:

• Managing Multiple Businesses (B2B): You can create a separate sub-organization for each of your customers. For example, if you provide a scheduling service for different companies, each company would get its own sub-organization.
• Direct-to-Consumer (B2C): You can skip creating sub-organizations and add all your users directly into your main organization. E.g. where you're managing the calendars of individual customers.

👤 Users: A User is an individual account that represents a person. A User can exist on its own, or it can be associated with one or more Organizations. This is the entity that connects a calendar account (like Google, Outlook, or iCloud) to Recal, allowing the platform to access calendar information. Users can have custom IDs that correspond with your database for easier integration.

🗓️ Events: An Event is a standard calendar entry, like an appointment or a meeting. Users create, update, and delete Events, and these actions are synchronized with their connected calendar.

Real World Examples

Example 1: Salon Manager

Imagine you have a company called "Salon Manager". You want to use Recal to manage your customers calendars and events. You would create a Recal account for yourself with a main Recal organization called "Salon Manager". Then you would create organizations (sub-organizations) for your customers, e.g. a hair salon called "Jeremie's Hairsalon" and for each employee you would create a user assigned to these organizations. Employees then can connect their calendars to Recal and create, update and delete events.

Entity Relationship Diagram

What you see

1. Main Recal Organization: "Salon Manager" is your container in Recal
2. Organizations: Each customer salon (Jeremie's Hairsalon, Glamour Studio, Beauty Haven) is an organization (sub-organization) for managing that business
3. Users: Employees are created as users and can be assigned to one or multiple organizations (salons)
4. Calendar Connections: Each employee connects their preferred calendar provider (Google, Outlook, iCloud, etc.) to sync appointments
5. Events: Calendar events (appointments, meetings) are created and synced through the connected calendars

Example 2: Calendar App

Imagine you have a company called "The Calendar App". You want to use Recal to manage your users calendars and events. You would create a Recal account for yourself with a main Recal organization called "The Calendar App". In this case, you don't need organizations (sub-organizations), so you would directly create users for your customers, e.g. Kevin and Lisa. Kevin and Lisa then can connect their calendars to Recal and create, update and delete events.

Entity Relationship Diagram

What you see

1. Main Recal Organization: "The Calendar App" is your container in Recal (no sub-organizations needed)
2. Users: Individual customers (Kevin, Lisa, Michael, Sarah, Alex) are created as users directly under the organization
3. Calendar Connections: Each user can connect their preferred calendar provider (Google, Outlook, iCloud, etc.)
4. Events: Users create and manage their personal and professional events through the connected calendars

Key Differences Between Examples

Summary

Recal's three entities - Organizations, Users, and Events - work together to enable any calendar use case. Use Organizations to manage multiple businesses or teams (like individual salons), or skip them entirely for direct-to-consumer apps. Organizations unlock powerful features like shared availability calculations, making it easy to find times when multiple team members are free. Users connect their preferred calendar providers, and Events can be easily created and managed.

Next Steps