Booking approvals for meeting rooms synced with Google Workspace

Booking approvals let you keep control over who gets a meeting room, even when that room is synced with Google Calendar. Once approvals are switched on, every request for the room waits for a decision instead of being confirmed automatically. Approvers can decide in deskbird, resource managers can decide directly in Google Calendar, and both sides stay in sync within seconds, so nobody has to check two systems.

1. Before you start
2. Set up the room calendar in Google
3. Enable booking approvals in deskbird
4. How approvals work day to day
5. Recurring meetings and overlapping requests
6. Test your setup
7. Troubleshooting
8. FAQs

1. Before you start

Make sure the following is in place before you configure approvals:

• Your Google Workspace is connected in deskbird under Admin > Integrations > Rooms calendar sync, and the meeting room is linked to its Google resource calendar. If the sync is not set up yet, connect it first.
• Your company has the Rooms Plus package, which includes booking approvals.
• You know which Google account was used to connect the Workspace (the connecting admin). You need this account in Set up the room calendar in Google.
• Someone with manage access to the room’s resource calendar in Google Calendar can make the changes described below – usually a Google Workspace admin.

💡 Approvals are configured per room. Rooms without approvals keep working exactly as before.

2. Set up the room calendar in Google

Do this in Google Calendar for every room that should require approval:

1. Open the room’s calendar settings: Google Calendar > the room under your calendars > three dots > Settings and sharing.
2. Under Auto-accept invitations, select Automatically add all invitations to this calendar. This stops the room from answering on its own, so every request waits for a decision.
3. Under Share with specific people or groups, add the connecting admin account with the permission Make changes and manage sharing.
4. Optional: if some people should also decide directly in Google Calendar, share the room calendar with them the same way (Make changes and manage sharing) and ask them to turn on event notifications for that calendar so they see new requests.

⚠️ Step 3 is the one that is most often missed. Google’s default gives even admins read-only access to room calendars. Without write access, bookings still sync, but approve and reject decisions cannot be written back to Google and appear to have no effect.

💡 If you skip step 2, the room keeps auto-accepting every invitation, and deskbird mirrors that faithfully: every booking shows up as approved immediately.

3. Enable booking approvals in deskbird

Do this in the deskbird web app as an admin:

1. Go to Admin > Floors & spaces and open the office and floor the room belongs to.
2. Open the meeting room’s settings.
3. Enable Booking approvals.
4. Select at least one approver. Any user in the company can be an approver.
5. Save.

That is the entire deskbird setup. Approvers need no permissions in Google Calendar at all – they decide in deskbird, and deskbird writes the decision to the room calendar on their behalf.

4. How approvals work day to day

deskbird and the room’s Google calendar mirror each other in both directions. The room’s answer in Google determines the booking status in deskbird:

Booking from either side

• A room booked in deskbird is created as pending, and the event lands on the room’s Google calendar without an answer from the room.
• An event created in Google Calendar with the room added appears in deskbird as a pending request.
• Approvers decide on the Requests page in deskbird; resource managers can decide in Google Calendar. Both decisions count equally and are mirrored within seconds. When a decision came from Google, the request details name Google Calendar as the decider.

What happens after a decision

• An approval makes the room accept the invitation in Google. A rejection makes the room decline it, and the organizer receives Google’s standard notification.
• Rejected events stay on the room’s calendar as declined entries. deskbird never deletes entries from a customer calendar.
• Google does not support comments on a decline, so the organizer sees a plain decline without a reason. The reason is always visible in deskbird: rejected by an approver, declined in Google Calendar, canceled in Google Calendar, or automatically rejected.

Changes made by the organizer

• Moving or resizing the meeting resets the room’s answer, so the booking returns to pending for the new time slot on both sides.
• Canceling the event while it is still pending closes the request as rejected, with the reason “Canceled in Google Calendar”.
• If nobody decides before the meeting starts, the request is rejected automatically.

Bringing a rejected booking back

• Changing the room’s answer in Google from No to Yes turns a rejected booking back into an approved one. Changing it to Maybe sets it back to pending, and moving a rejected meeting re-opens it as pending at the new time.
• This only works for meetings that have not ended yet, and only for decisions made in Google Calendar. A rejection made in deskbird is final, and a booking that was rejected because of a buffer time conflict only comes back if that conflict no longer exists.

💡 If a notification from Google is ever lost, a background check reconciles the approval status a few times a day, so both sides settle on the same result without anyone doing anything.

5. Recurring meetings and overlapping requests

• One decision for the series: approving a recurring meeting covers the whole series. Single occurrences can still be decided separately in deskbird and in Google.
• Answering the series in Google: if someone answers the series master event in Google, Google overwrites the answers for all individual occurrences. deskbird re-applies its own per-occurrence decisions afterwards, so both calendars end up matching the decisions made in deskbird.
• Declining one occurrence in Google frees that slot in deskbird again.
• “This and following” splits the series in Google. deskbird receives the second part as a separate series.
• Overlapping requests are not declined automatically. Because the room no longer answers on its own, several requests can be pending for the same time slot. Approving one of them leaves the others pending, so the approver decides which ones to reject.

6. Test your setup

A five-minute check confirms that everything is wired correctly:

1. Book the room in deskbird. The booking shows as pending, and the event appears on the room’s Google calendar with no answer from the room.
2. Approve the booking in deskbird. The room’s answer changes to accepted in Google within seconds.
3. Create an event in Google Calendar and add the room. A pending request appears in deskbird. Reject it, and the room declines the invitation in Google.

⚠️ If step 2 does not show up in Google, or the booking flips back to pending, the calendar share from Set up the room calendar in Google is missing. This is by far the most common cause.

7. Troubleshooting

8. FAQs