How to set fixed or specific booking times (workaround) – Timely

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Setting fixed and specific booking times is currently not a feature available via Timely. Instead, we have some suggestions that may achieve what you are wanting to do; however these are not guaranteed to work for every business. If this is a feature you would like to see introduced, please submit a feedback form to our Product team via the help centre, by selecting compliments and feedback from the dropdown options.

In this article, you will learn workarounds for setting fixed or specific booking times. For more information on Timely's calendar feature, see our help guide Introduction: Timely calendar.

Introduction to rostering your staff

You can set the hours your staff members are available for appointments by using a 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 our help guide How to roster your staff.

Introduction to online booking frequency

If you want to offer appointments at set times and they occur at regular intervals (e.g. 9.00am, 10.30am, 12.00pm, 1.30pm, 3.00pm and 4.30pm etc) 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, see our help guide How to set online booking frequency.

Introduction to 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, then you can use busy time to prevent these times from being booked. To do this:

1 Roster the staff member for the specific days and times that they will be working, via setup > roster.

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

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

4 To apply this to all future time slots that you would like to set as busy time, you can pop over to the reoccurrence tab.

5 Update the repeat option to weekly (or your preferred interval) and then select 1 (or your desired instance of reoccurrence) in the drop down next to repeat every.

6 When you are ready, click save to apply your changes.

Introduction to padding time

You may have services that 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 cannot book online during this window. Though, this can be overridden by booking an appointment directly on the calendar.

Timely note: padding time is different to process, and you cannot book during a padding window. For more information, see our help guides How to add processing time to services and How to add padding time to services.

How to use a combination of settings

Sometimes a mixture settings are 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 30 minute lunch break at 12:30pm and another 30 minute 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 minutes 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

Timely note: these options will only work if you have show all available times enabled within your setup > online bookings > optimise your calendar settings.