Appointment Based Bookings and Availabilities

This guide describes how to offer one-on-one private sessions. Your clients can pick a time slot that works best for them only when you're available to make scheduling quick and easy.

If you are on a Studio subscription plan and have staff members that you would like your clients to book appointments with, please also read this help article.

Table of Contents:

• Enable Appointment Bookings
  • Appointment Scheduling
  • Staff and Resources Settings
  • Variable Session Length
  • Automatically Block off your Event/Class Time
• Set up Your Main Availability
  • Copy Weekly Hours
  • Change Schedule
  • Special Availability Windows
  • Add Time Off
  • Add Time off to Specific Dates
• How Clients Book Appointments

Tutorial Video

Watch this short video on how OfferingTree can make your scheduling life easier! You can also read the sections below to get step-by-step instructions for setting up your appointment schedule.

Enable Appointment Bookings on Your Offerings

Once you have your availability set, you can enable each of your offerings individually to offer appointments. To get started, visit the "Offerings" page under the "Offerings" section. Create or edit the Offering you wish to enable appointments for and check the "Enable Appointments" checkbox under "Appointment Information".

This will bring you to the "Edit Appointment Information" pop-up. Here you can define the price of the appointment and select if you want to accept online payments for registration.

Appointment Scheduling

You can set the duration of the appointment, clean up and set up time, minimum and advanced notices.

• Duration: You can set the duration of the appointment (how long the session with the client / student is). For variable duration settings, click here.
• Start time increments: The increments by which clients can book your appointment. For example, every 30 minutes of the hour, hourly, or every 15 minutes, etc.
• Setup and Cleanup Time: you can set how much time you need before or after the appointment. For example, if the session duration is 45 minutes and you have 10 minutes of setup time and 5 minutes of cleanup time, when someone books this appointment OfferingTree will block off a total of 1 hour from your availability.
• Minimum and Maximum Advance Notice: Minimum notice prevents someone from booking a last-minute appointment in case you need time to prepare or travel. Maximum notice prevents someone from booking an appointment too far in the future.

Note: Please set your availability for the actual times you are available (e.g., 9:00 am - 5:00 pm). You do not need to account for setup or cleanup time at the start or end of your day. The system automatically handles this:

• Setup time is not added before your first appointment.
• Cleanup time is not added after your last appointment.

Staff and Resource Settings

Choose which resources/rooms are connected to this appointment based offerings. Some appointments can be unstaffed and connected to a resource's main or custom schedule. Read more about resource and room settings in this article.

Staff members can be added to specific offerings, using their main availability schedule, or a custom one created specifically for this offering.

Variable Session Length

You are able to setup one appointment based offering for multiple varied length appointments with corresponding pricing.

Once this is toggled on, the different session length can be added under the Payment Settings.

Default session length can be chosen that will be automatically chosen when a client is booking a session.

Automatically Block off your Event/Class times

If you also teach a class or hold events, you can have these events automatically block off your availability time. To do this, ensure that you toggle the "Automatically block event times" option when creating your availability.

If you have existing availability setup, you can toggle this by editing your availability.

Set up Your Main Availability

Create your main schedule by choosing which days of the week you are available for appointment based sessions. If you are rostered into an event/class on the schedule, that time will be automatically blocked off based on the setting above. Easily set your availability windows for these days.

Copy Weekly Hour Setup

To make creating your main or custom schedule, you can copy specific day's setup to multiple days with the duplicate icon. You can also choose from quick options like Weekdays, All days, Clear.

Change Schedule

From the appointment availability setting the schedule can be changed. These changes can apply to some specific dates, create a new weekly availability schedule, or update current ones for specific appointment types.

Special Availability Windows

From the main schedule specific dates can be opened up to your availability.

1. Choose your or a staff member's availability
2. Scroll down to "Add date override"
3. Choose a specific date from the calendar, either a regular or a bold (a date with an availability added) number. Multiple dates can be chosen.
4. Set availability window.
5. Hit Apply to save.

Add Time Off

You can add time off from your normal availability. You may need to do this because you have a personal day off or you need to be away for a few hours.

1. Navigate to the "Availability" page by clicking on the "Schedule" on the side bar.
2. Once on the "Availability" page, click the "Add" button under Staff Time Off section.
3. Fill out the Start Date / Start Time and End Date / End Time for your corresponding time off. You can add a helpful note for yourself as to why you are adding the time off (this will not be visible on your site to the public).
4. Make sure to press "Create" to save the time off entry.
5. Your time off should now be visible in the table. You can edit or delete your time off entry from the table as well.

Adding Time Off to Specific Dates

1. Open up your or your staff members main schedule.
2. Select the bolded dates (these have availabilities) when the time off needs to be added
3. Choose all day or change time of window in settings
4. Add note for time off
5. Then hit save

How Clients Book Appointments With You

Now that you know how to set up appointments with OfferingTree, we'll describe how it looks to your clients and students. On the Offerings page, your visitors will see a "Book Now" button under any offering that is enabled for appointments.

Once your clients select the Offering they would like to book, they are taken to a calendar page where they can pick an open date and time to book the appointment. If another client or student already booked a time slot on a particular day, that time will not be shown to others making scheduling convenient and easy for you and your clients.

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