Add a desk

A desk is a bookable resource like a room, made on the same form, held to the same rules and photographed by the same screens. So this article is short on purpose: it is the handful of places a desk is not a room, and Add a room is everything else.

1. Open Hot desks

Desks have their own page in the console — Hot desks, Manage desks and their settings — sitting beside Standard Rooms under Resources.

It is the same list you already know, minus one column: there is no Capacity here, because a desk does not have one. Add, Import, the QR code manager and the columns chooser are all where they are on the room list.

2. Add it — one field, as on the room list

Add opens the same small panel with a single Name field, pre-filled with the next number in the list — Desk 38. Change it or accept it.

Save creates the desk and closes the panel — no settings open, nothing announces success but a new row. Check the list before clicking Add again.

The offered number counts the whole list rather than the floor you are working on, so on an estate of any size it is a placeholder, not a suggestion. Desks are found by name far more often than rooms are — a floor of Desk 38, Desk 39, Desk 40 is unusable on a map — so this is the moment to name it something a person could say out loud.

3. A desk has no capacity, and its own list of categories

Open the row, choose Edit, and the form is the room’s form with two differences on the Basic page:

• There is no Capacity field. Not hidden from you — absent from the record. A desk is saved with no capacity at all, which is why nothing searches desks by how many people they seat, and why the booking form never warns a desk booker about numbers.
• Category offers the desk categories only. A category is tied to one resource type, so a desk can never be given a room’s category and a room can never be given a desk’s — the picker here holds whatever your administrator made for desks, which on a new tenant is Hot desk, Workspace, Work station, Phone booth and Other desk type. An empty list means nobody has made any yet; see Set up categories and amenities. It is worth filling in: the category is what people filter a floor of eighty desks down by.

Everything else on the page — name and description per language, amenity, business hour, organization unit, Access ID — works exactly as Add a room describes it.

4. Put it on the floor plan, not just on a floor

Location matters more on a desk than on anything else in Booking, so be deliberate about it here rather than coming back to it.

A room has a door with a name on it: somebody told to use Board Room can find Board Room. A desk has neither — Desk 34 is a word, not a place — so the point you click on the floor plan is the desk’s address. It is what puts the desk on the map people pick desks from, what lets a colleague be found at their seat, and what makes a scan of the sticker on it mean something in a building rather than in a list.

A desk with a floor but no point saves happily, appears in searches, and never appears on the plan. That is the commonest reason somebody reports a desk “missing” when it is not.

The picker itself — building, then floor, then a click on the plan — is the same one described in Add a room, step 3.

5. Give it a sticker, because it will never have a panel

A meeting room gets a screen by the door. A floor of eighty desks does not: a panel per desk costs more than the desk is worth, which is why almost every hot-desk floor runs on printed QR stickers instead.

One goes on each desk, and it is the whole booking interface for it — take the desk, confirm the booking you already made, add half an hour, or hand it back on the way out, from an ordinary phone with nothing installed.

Three things are worth knowing while you are still on this page:

• Every desk already has its code. There is nothing to switch on; the sticker exists from the moment the desk does.
• The dialog opens on the right size for you. A desk starts on Small — a square sticker carrying Scan to book — where a room starts on the large portrait door poster.
• A whole floor is one operation. The QR code manager at the top of the list produces every sticker as a single archive, which is what you hand to a print shop.

The rest — the sizes, the print resolutions, where on the desk to stick it, and the settings that decide what a scan is then allowed to do — is Print and put up resource stickers.

6. Do a whole floor from a spreadsheet

Import, beside Add, creates and updates desks in one pass, and a desk sheet is the simplest one Offision has: an ID column and a name column per language, and nothing else. Capacity is a room column and Has EV Charger is a parking one, so neither appears on a desk import.

Everything a desk actually needs — its location, its policy, its category — is set on the desk afterwards, per steps 3 and 4. Import is how you get eighty named rows into the list in a minute; it is not how you finish them. The mechanics, including the preview that counts what is new before anything is written, are in Add a room.

7. Check it worked

Not in the console, which shows you every desk whatever state it is in. Open the user app as an ordinary account, search for the desk by name, and book it. Then open the floor plan and confirm it is where you put it.

If it does not come back at all, it is the same two answers as for a room: Booking settings is off on the Policy page, or the desk is on a team space you are not a member of.

A desk that belongs to one person

Everything above is a desk anybody may take. A desk permanently assigned to one employee is a different thing in Offision, on a different page, and the difference is worth knowing before you build a floor the wrong way.

Fixed Desks is its own module. A fixed desk is assigned, not booked, and its form says so — a photo, a name, a User, a location and a description. There is no booking toggle, no booking policy, no quota and no booking form, because nobody is going to reserve it.

The two convert in both directions from the row menu — Change to Fixed on a bookable desk, and back again on a fixed one — so a floor that turns out to need more shared seating is a change of type rather than a rebuild.

What this does not cover

• The rules a desk floor needs. Walk-in only, all-day bookings, the check-in window that reclaims an empty desk — see Set the rules a hot-desk floor needs.
• Charging desks and rooms separately. A month of hot-desking eating the meeting-room allowance is a quota question — see Charge desks and rooms from separate budgets.
• AM and PM desks. Half-day desks are a Booking hours time-slot schedule, not a desk setting — see Restrict bookings to fixed time slots.
• What people then do with the desk. Booking one, finding one on the map and scanning the sticker are all in the user guide.