How to set fixed or specific booking times

This articles covers how to tailor your calendar to set fixed or specific booking times.  You can use one or a combination of the following options.

In this article, you will learn how:

• Roster your staff
• Setting the staff booking frequency
• Scheduling busy time
• Using padding time
• Using a combination of settings

Currently, this feature is not available within Timely, however we have some suggestions below, that may achieve what you are wanting to do. 

If this is a feature that you would like to see introduced into Timely in the future, please pass this feedback onto our Product Teams on our Help Centre Form, by selecting Compliments and Feedback from the form drop down.

Rostering staff

You can set the hours your staff members are available for appointments by using Roster. Set a staff member's normal hours as well as make adjustments for a specific day or occasion.

Bear in mind that a staff member can only be rostered on using a single start time and end time for each day. 

The start time of the staff member (from either your Roster settings, or your Normal working hours), combined with your online booking frequency settings will assist you in setting fixed booking times.
 

You can find out more about rostering in the How to roster your staff guide.

Staff booking frequency

If you want to offer appointments at set times and they occur at regular intervals (e.g., 9.00, 10.30, 12.00, 1.30, 3.00 and 4.30) then a simple way to make sure your customers only book appointments at these times is to set how often a staff member can be booked.

To make sure your next available booking slot starts right after any scheduled breaks, you can check the box next to Reset the online booking frequency after a break.

For more information on booking frequency, check out our  How to set online booking frequency article.

Busy Time

When you roster a staff member on for a particular day you currently have the ability to roster a single start and end time. If your staff work a split shift or have blocks of time throughout the day where they are unavailable you can use busy time to prevent these times from being booked.

Example: Your staff member works a split shift on a Friday from 9am to 1pm and then resumes work again from 5pm to 8pm.

1Roster the staff member on Wednesday from 9am to 8pm (Setup > Roster).

2Click on the time in the calendar you would like to block out and choose Busy time from the options: 

3Select the duration, enter a description and make sure the box Prevent online bookings during this time? is checked.

4To apply this to all future Wednesdays, you can pop over to the Recurrence tab.

5Update the Repeat option to 'Weekly' and select '1' in the drop down next to Repeat Every: 

6Click Save to complete.

Read the Block out time with breaks an busy time article to find out more.

Padding Time

Some services require set up or clean up time before the next service can be performed or when travel time needs to be factored in for mobile locations. 

Timely lets you add padding time either before, after (or both) your services.

Padding time is added to the length of the appointment which means your customers can't book online during this extra time. This can be overridden by booking an appointment directly on the calendar. Here you can see what it looks like on the calendar.

You can find out about padding time in the How to set padding time between appointments article.

Using a combination of settings

Sometimes a mixture of all of the above is required to solve your fixed booking scenario. The following details a scenario and an example solution featuring many of the approaches discussed above.

Example scenario

Your staff member provides services that are at varying lengths with the maximum duration at 75 minutes. 

They work from 9.30 to 7.30pm and have a 30min lunch break at 12:30pm and another 30 min break at 4:00pm. 

They want their customers to be able to book appointments at:

• 9:30am
• 11:00am
• 1:00pm
• 2:30pm
• 4:30pm
• 6:00pm

Example solution

• Roster your staff member from 9:30am to 7:15pm.
• Add Padding time after services so that all services are 75 mins in length.
• Add recurring Busy time at 10:45am for 15 mins.
• Add recurring Busy time at 12:15pm for 45 mins.
• Add recurring Busy time at 2:15pm for 15 mins.
• Add recurring Busy time at 3:45pm for 45 mins.
• Add recurring Busy time at 5:45pm for 15 mins.
   

Good to know 

These options will only work if you have 'Show all available times' enabled within your Setup > Online Bookings > Optimise your calendar settings.