Import your schedule
Most competition directors already have their season written down somewhere — a spreadsheet, a PDF a hotel sent over, a page on their own website. You do not have to retype any of it. Herding Cats reads the document you already have and drafts the whole season for you to check.
Nothing is saved until you press the button at the end. You can change your mind the whole way through.
What you can feed it
The season builder takes:
- A spreadsheet — CSV, TSV, or Excel (
.xlsx) - A PDF — including planning grids and calendar exports
- Pasted text — an email, a list, whatever you have in your clipboard
- Your own website — it reads last season’s schedule off a tour-dates page
Files can be up to 10 MB each.
Old-style Excel files (.xls) and Apple Numbers files are not supported. Open the file, save or export it as .xlsx or CSV, then try again.
A scanned PDF — one that is really a photograph of a page — has no text to read. Export the data as a spreadsheet instead.
You do not need to tidy the file up first, rename columns, or delete extra sheets. Hotel spreadsheets, calendar exports, planning grids, and forwarded schedules all work as they are.
Draft your season
- Open the season builder
Go to Events in the left menu, then the Season planning tab. Press Build a season.
The page is headed Build a season.
- Give it your document
Under Season document there is a box that says Drop a schedule document here, or browse. Drag your file onto it, or click it to pick the file.
If your schedule is in an email rather than a file, click …or paste a schedule or email instead, paste the text, and press Read the pasted text.
- Say which season, if the file covers several
There is a small box that reads Which season? (optional — e.g. “2027”). Fill it in only when one document lists more than one season side by side. Otherwise leave it empty.
- Add your website too, if you like
Below the divider marked or there is Website or schedule page. Type your tour-dates page address and press Scrape the schedule.
This reads last season’s schedule from your own site and moves the dates onto this season’s weekends.
A document and a website are not an either/or. Do one, then the other. Herding Cats puts the two together into a single list for you to review — this is what “merging” means here.
When it finds the same event in both places (same city, same dates), it keeps it as one row and uses whatever you already have. It never overwrites something you filled in; it only fills in the blanks.
Check the list before it becomes real
Next comes the review screen, headed This season’s events, with a count like (14 of 16 selected). Underneath it says Uncheck events that aren’t happening. Adjust anything — nothing is saved yet.
Each row is one event, and every part of it can be edited right there:
- The Event name
- The Venue (optional)
- The Airport — the three-letter code your staff fly into
- The start and end dates
- A status dropdown, which starts on Status —
The tick box at the start of each row controls whether that event gets created. Untick anything that is not happening this year. The little bin button removes a row entirely.
Under each row you will see where it came from — Last year: for something read off your website, or Document: for something read out of a file, along with the exact wording the document used.
A row with no airport shows No airport — flight features degraded. It will still be created, but flight searching and travel planning for that event will be limited until you add one. It only takes a second to fix here.
Near the top of the list there is a Booking status: line summarising what it found, with chips like 3 confirmed, 2 on hold, and 1 cancelled (unchecked). Anything the document marked as cancelled is unticked for you automatically.
If you spot something missing, the buttons at the top of the card let you add more without starting over: Import a document, Scrape website, and Add event.
Create the events
When the list looks right, press Create {number} events at the bottom.
If a ticked row is missing a name or has a bad date, you will see a message telling you which ones and you will not be able to continue until they are fixed — or you untick them.
You will also see a line telling you how many events this uses out of your plan’s yearly allowance for that year.
The finish screen is headed Season drafted. Your events are created as drafts — you still fill in venues, timelines, and staffing afterwards.
Press Open the season board to go straight to planning, or View events to see them in a list.
The other way in: drop everything at once
If you have a pile of files and are not sure what is what, go to Company → Documents. The page is headed Document intake.
Drop everything on it at once — schedules, rosters, contracts, rooming lists. Herding Cats stores every file as it is, works out what each one is, and puts a button on it pointing at the right place. A schedule gets a button reading Open the season builder.
Each file shows what it thinks it found, in plain words — for example Looks like a season schedule, Might be a staff roster, or We couldn’t tell what this is, usually with a confidence percentage.
Under a file that it could not place, there is Help us identify it: with a dropdown. Pick the right kind — Season schedule, Staff roster, Rooming list, Contract (hotel or venue) and so on — and it will route the file properly.
Big imports keep running even if you close the tab. You will see You can leave this page — we’ll notify you when it’s done. When it finishes, the card reads Import finished. If something went wrong it reads This import couldn’t finish, with the reason.
What to do next
- Plan your weekends — see the whole tour at once and spot the gaps.
- Staff an event — put people on the events you just created.