Availability & Blocked Time

Set your availability once, and online booking only ever offers clients times that fit it. Block time off with calendar events when real life interrupts the routine.

Setting your availability

Your availability is made of availability blocks: a block is a stretch of time on chosen days, at one or more of your offices, offering the services you pick. Clients can only request the times your blocks cover. The first time, a short setup walks you through it:

1. Open the calendar, click the gear icon at the top right, and choose Set up appointment requests. (You can also open it from Settings → Online Booking, under Availability, with Manage availability.)
2. Check the Scheduling preferences (practice-wide; owners and managers can change them) and click Next.
3. For each day you work, set the start and end time. The + adds a second range on a day, say 9:00 AM–12:00 PM and 4:00 PM–8:00 PM. Choose when the block starts and ends (never for regular hours), the location(s) it applies to, and the services clients can request in it. Click Next.
4. Review the summary and click Save. Make sure Accepting new clients is on if you want new clients to see these times.

Every block needs an office location, so if the setup asks you to add one first, do that under Settings → Practice and come back. A video location (your Video Office, Zoom or Doxy) is added the same way, with Add Location.

Settings → Online Booking shows where you stand: No availability set up until your first block, then You have set up availability. Its Manage availability link opens your availability schedule.

Changing your blocks

1. On the calendar, click the gear icon and choose View availability schedule. Your blocks are the blue bars (gray when a block doesn't take online requests).
2. Click a block and Edit to change its days, times, dates, offices or services, or click + Add availability for a new block. Blocks can overlap: for example, one block for the office on Tuesdays and another, same hours, for telehealth.
3. Allow online appointment requests on a block is what makes it bookable. Turn it off and the block still shades your calendar as working hours, but clients can't request those times. Online booking for you is on while any block allows requests.
4. Click Save. Changes reach your booking page and the client portal within seconds.

Times are in your practice's time zone (shown and changed at Settings → Calendar). If your hours look shifted to clients, fix the time zone there, not your blocks.

Availability is personal: each clinician sets their own blocks under their own login. Owners and managers can view a colleague's schedule from the clinician picker on the availability schedule.

Choosing how sessions get booked

On the same page, two sections tune what clients are offered. Adjust them and click Save Changes:

• Session length and any time blocked off before or after a session are set on each service under Settings → Billing → Fee Schedule. A session plus its block-off time has to fit inside an availability block for a time to be offered, so a 53-minute service with 10 minutes blocked off after needs blocks of at least 63 minutes.
• Appointment start times — on the hour, on the half hour (9:00, 9:30), on the quarter hour, or based on service duration.
• Minimum Notice — how soon clients can book: 24, 48, or 72 hours ahead (default 24, so no surprise same-morning sessions).
• Maximum Advance — how far ahead: 1 week to 6 months (default 1 month).

Blocking time off

Vacation, lunch, a staff meeting — anything that should take time away from online booking is a calendar event:

1. On the calendar, click the + button in the top bar and choose New Appointment (or just click an empty spot on the calendar).
2. Switch the toggle at the top of the panel from Appointment to Event.
3. Enter a title ("Lunch", "Staff Meeting"), and set the times — or tick All day to block the whole day (perfect for vacation). Tick Recurring for something like a weekly lunch block.
4. Click Create Event.

The event's window disappears from online booking immediately; delete the event to release the time. Appointments already on your calendar block their slots automatically too, and if you've connected Google Calendar, busy events there block booking as well — your personal calendar protects your practice calendar without any extra setup.

Giving an event a color

Click the small gray circle at the left of the Event Title box and pick a color. The event shows in that color on your calendar, which makes lunch, admin time and personal blocks easy to tell apart. Default sets it back to gray. To change it later, click the event and use the same circle next to its title; for a recurring event you can apply the change to this event only or to it and every one after it.

The color is yours alone: anyone else who views your calendar sees your events in the usual gray. Supervision meetings keep their violet, and the circle isn't offered when you put an event on a colleague's calendar.

Blocking time on a colleague's calendar

Owners, practice managers, and schedulers can put an event on another clinician's calendar — so the front desk can mark a clinician away without asking them to do it themselves:

1. Open the Event tab as above. A Clinician picker appears at the top for seats that can book on someone else's behalf.
2. Pick whose calendar the event belongs on. (Staff seats without their own calendar must choose — there's no default, so a block can't land on the wrong calendar by accident.)
3. Set the title and times as usual and click Create Event.

The block keeps that clinician's time from being booked online, works for recurring events, and syncs to their connected Google Calendar. Solo practices see no change — your events are always your own.

Letting new clients book

Availability covers your existing clients booking through the portal. For prospective clients to book through your public booking page or website widget, one more switch must be on:

1. Go to Settings → Online Booking.
2. Turn on Accept Requests from New Clients in the New Client Requests section.
3. Optionally tick Allow couples requests so new clients can request couples therapy.

These two apply to the whole practice, so only the practice owner, clinicians with entire-practice access, and practice managers can change them — everyone else sees them greyed out.

Troubleshooting & FAQ

Clients say they see no available times. Work down this list:

1. Does at least one of your availability blocks have Allow online appointment requests on? Online booking is off until one does. Settings → Online Booking shows the state at the top.
2. Does a block cover that day, at that location, offering that service? A block only offers the services and offices listed on it.
3. Is the time already taken by an appointment, a calendar event, or a Google Calendar busy block? An All day event blanks the entire day.
4. Are they looking too soon? With 24-hour minimum notice, "today" is usually empty by design.

A new client can't book at all. That's the separate practice-wide switch — see Letting new clients book. Your own availability being on isn't enough.

Does availability stop me from scheduling whenever I want? No. It only limits what clients can book online. You and your staff can always create appointments at any time — the calendar lightly shades your off hours as a visual cue but never blocks or warns.

A clinician says they can't find where to set their hours. On the calendar, the gear icon at the top right: Set up appointment requests the first time, View availability schedule after that. Settings → Online Booking has a Manage availability link to the same place.

Do cancelled sessions free the slot back up? Yes — cancel (or mark no-show), and the time is offered online again immediately.

Can the owner set everyone's hours? No — each clinician logs in and sets their own blocks.

Related

• Online booking & the booking widget
• Calendar overview
• Google Calendar sync