Appointment types & availability

An appointment type is one bookable service. It sets how long the booking runs, who can take it, which hours are open each week, how far ahead a customer can book, and whether the service shows on your public page. You configure types under Appointments → Configuration → Appointment Types, a menu only Appointments managers see. A new type stays unpublished until you publish it, so you set it up in full before anyone can book it.

Create an appointment type

1. Open Appointments → Configuration → Appointment Types.
2. Click New.
3. Enter a Name for the service, such as "30-minute consult".
4. Set Duration (hours). A whole number is hours; 0.5 is 30 minutes. The default is one hour.
5. Add a Location label such as "Phone" or "On-site". This is a free-text label that shows on the booking and the confirmation email.
6. Write a Description if the service needs one.
7. Save.

Choose who staffs it

Set Staff Members to the people who take this service. When a customer books, Appointments assigns the first staffer who is free.

Leave Staff Members empty and every internal user counts as staff for this service. That surprises people, so set the field unless you want the whole company bookable.

Set your weekly hours

Open hours live on the Available Slots tab. Each row is one window on one weekday.

1. Open the Available Slots tab.
2. Click Add a line.
3. Pick a Day of Week, a Start Time, and an End Time.
4. Add a row for each window. Split a day into morning and afternoon by adding two rows for the same weekday.

Appointments builds the times it offers from these windows, in steps the length of the service (30 minutes at the shortest). A service with no window on a given weekday offers no times that day. The time zone of these hours is set on the Availability tab, described below.

Set notice and how far ahead

Open the Limits and notice tab. Two settings bound when a customer can book:

• Minimum notice is how far ahead of a time a customer must book. Type a number and choose hours or days: 2 days and 48 hours are the same notice. The default is 24 hours, so times inside that window are not offered.
• How far ahead is how far into the future the page opens. Choose A number of days from today and set Maximum Advance Booking (days), 30 by default, or choose Between two dates and set the First day offered and the Last day offered. Both days are included, and an empty date has no limit on that side.

Keep a gap around each meeting

Under Gaps and spacing on the same tab:

• Gap before a meeting and Gap after a meeting are minutes. Nobody is booked into that time before or after a meeting. A gap may reach outside your hours, because it only keeps clear of other bookings and calendar events.
• Start a meeting every (minutes) is how often a meeting may start, counted from the start of each block of hours. It can be shorter than the meeting: 15 offers a 30 minute meeting at 9:00, 9:15, 9:30 and so on. Leave it at 0 to use Minutes between times, or the length of the meeting.

Limit how many bookings a type takes

Under Limits on bookings set Most bookings per day, per week and per month. Each counts the bookings of this type that exist, not the times on offer, in the time zone of the type, and a week runs Monday to Sunday. A day, week or month that is full has no times left. A meeting marked done still counts; a cancelled one does not. Most upcoming bookings per person stops one email address from holding more than that many bookings of the type that have not happened yet. For each of these, 0 means no limit.

Create a CRM lead per booking

Turn on Create CRM Lead and every confirmed booking of this type opens a lead in CRM, carrying the customer's name, email, phone, address, and notes. The toggle is off by default. Leave it off for services where a booking is not a sales opportunity.

Publish or retire a service

• Published on Website controls whether the service appears at /appointment. A new type is unpublished, so build it first, then publish.
• To retire a service, unpublish it. A type that already has bookings cannot be deleted, so unpublishing is how you take it off the page while keeping its history.

Set the time zone of your hours

Each type has a Time zone field on the Availability tab. The days and hours on the Available Slots tab are the wall clock of that zone, daylight saving time included, so 9:00 to 20:00 in America/Chicago is 9 AM to 8 PM in Chicago all year. The booking page says which zone its times are in, and the confirmation email shows the time in the visitor's zone and in yours. A new type starts with the time zone of the person who creates it. A type with no time zone reads its hours as UTC, which is how every type worked before the field existed, so set it on the types you made earlier.

Offer fewer, evenly spaced times

Three settings on the Limits and notice tab change which times a day offers:

• Minutes between times is the least time between two offered times. Set 60 to offer one time per hour. Leave it at 0 to keep the old step, the length of the service, or 30 minutes if that is longer.
• Most times offered per day caps the day. Set 6 and a day offers at most six times spread across your hours, such as 9 AM, 11 AM, 1 PM, 3 PM, 5 PM and 7 PM. Leave it at 0 for no limit. When there is a limit on times per day chooses what happens to a time that is booked or busy. Pick from all the times of the day (the default) chooses the six first, so that time disappears and no other takes its place. Pick from the times that are still free takes busy times away first, so the page keeps showing as many times as the limit allows.
• Show only the first time of each day offers one time per day: the earliest that is free.

With a time zone, a spacing or a limit set, the booking page only accepts a time it offers: a time that was just booked, or one outside your hours, is refused and the visitor is asked to choose again. A time is one seat. Once it is booked it is not offered again, whichever staff member would have taken it.

Every service, with or without those settings, refuses a time in the past, a time inside its minimum notice, a time beyond its booking horizon, and a time when no staff member is free. When two people pick the same time at the same moment, the first is booked and the second is asked to choose another time.

Use each host's own hours

On the Availability tab, Whose hours has two choices. The hours of this type uses the Available Slots tab alone. The hours of each host also keeps to the weekly hours of the host who would take the booking: a time is offered only when it is inside the type's hours and inside that host's schedule, dates that differ included. Each host sets theirs under My availability. A host's time off takes their days for every type, whichever choice you make.

Preview what a visitor is offered

Click Preview times at the top of the type, choose a Visitor's time zone, and you see the next 14 days as a visitor in that zone sees them. It comes from the same rules the booking page uses, so what you see is what a visitor is offered right now, including the effect of gaps, limits, bookings, calendars and time off. A day with nothing to offer says No times.

Share a private booking link

Turn off Listed on the booking page to make a private link. The type is still published, but it does not appear in the list. The type then shows a Private link: an address that ends in a long random code, which nobody can find by counting up. Send that address to the people who may book. Set Staff Members to yourself so every booking lands on your calendar. Your administrator can also point a short address such as /yourname at it.

The older address, /appointment/ followed by the type's number, still works for anyone who has it, so a link you sent earlier keeps opening the page. Anyone can guess a number, so a private link keeps a service out of the list but is not a lock. If a private link reaches people it should not, click Make a new private link: the old address stops working at once.

Write the text on your booking page

Open the Page text tab on the type. The first box is shown under the name of the service on its booking page, for example what to bring or how long to allow. The second box replaces the standard lines under What happens next on the confirmation page. Leave a box empty to keep the standard words. The text can have headings, lists, bold and links. Anything that would run as a script is removed.

Booking questions

Open the Questions tab on a type to ask visitors more than their name and email, such as "What would you like to discuss?" or "Company website". The questions show in the booking form under the visitor's details and above the notes box, in the order you set. The booking page at /appointment and a person's own booking page both show them.

1. Open the Questions tab and click Add a line.
2. Type the Question, the words the visitor reads above the field. It can have 200 characters at most.
3. Choose the Type:
   • One line takes up to 300 characters.
   • Several lines takes up to 2000 characters and keeps line breaks.
   • Dropdown offers the choices you type in Choices, one per line: from 1 to 20 choices of up to 100 characters each. The visitor must pick one of them.
   • Yes or no is a tick box. The answer is always Yes or No.
   • Phone number keeps digits, spaces, plus, hyphen and round brackets, and removes anything else.
4. Tick Required when a visitor must answer to book. A required Yes or no must be ticked, so use it for something like agreeing to your terms. A visitor who leaves a required question empty goes back to the form with a message, and nothing is booked.
5. Add Example text if you want light words inside the empty field, and drag the handle to put the questions in order.

Each answer is kept on the booking, on its Answers tab. It also shows in the calendar event description after the customer's notes, in the CRM lead when the type creates leads, and on the confirmation page for the person who booked. Answers are always plain text. A booking keeps each question as the visitor read it, so changing or deleting a question later does not change the bookings you already have. Duplicating a type duplicates its questions.

Video meetings

Online video meeting is on for every new appointment type, so every confirmed booking gets a video call unless you turn it off, for a phone or on-site service for example. A type you made earlier keeps the setting it has, and the example types that come with a new workspace start with it off. The join link is in the confirmation email, in the calendar invitation and its .ics file, on the calendar event, and on the confirmation page for the person who booked. Staff open it with Join video call on the booking. Anyone with the link joins from a browser without an account.

Name the calendar event

Each booking makes an event on the host's Calendar, and its title is what the customer reads in the invitation email and in their own calendar. By default the title is the name of the type and the two names, for example "Demo call between Jordan Lee and Priya Raman". When only one of the two names is known it reads "Demo call with Priya Raman".

To word it your own way, open the type and fill in Event title, just under Location. Write {type}, {host} and {customer} where the name of the type, the host and the customer should go. For example {customer} and {host}: {type} gives "Priya Raman and Jordan Lee: Demo call". Leave the field empty for the default. Any other words in curly braces stay as you typed them, and a title that would come out empty falls back to the default, so an event is never nameless. The new wording applies to bookings made after you save: an event that already exists keeps the title it has.

Calendars

A booking is an event on your workspace Calendar for the staff member, and the customer is a guest of it. If the staff member has connected a Google or Outlook calendar, the event is copied there too, with the booking name, the time, the customer's notes and the place. The customer is left off the guest list of that copy, so they get one invitation, from EVERJUST.APP, and cannot move the booking from their own calendar app.

Related

• Appointments: overview and turning the app on.
• Your availability and time off: each host's weekly hours, dates that differ and time off.
• Take and manage bookings: what a confirmed booking does.
• Calendar: the schedule availability is checked against.
• CRM: where a booking's lead lands.