Optimize online schedule availability
In this guide, you’ll learn how to manage your online booking availability by choosing how time slots are offered to clients, helping reduce calendar gaps.
In this article
How schedule optimization works
Optimized online availability helps you make the most of your team’s schedule by controlling how time slots are offered to clients when booking online. By adjusting your preferences, you can reduce gaps in your calendar and keep your team’s availability more efficient. You can manage these settings by choosing how availability is displayed, either by offering Regular time slots, Reducing gaps, or Eliminating gaps.
- From the main menu on the left of your screen, go to Settings.
- Click on the Scheduling category and then select Online bookings from the left menu panel.
- Next to Schedule optimization, click on the Edit button to update the settings.
- Under Time slot internal, specify the duration between each available appointment slot, for example, 30 minutes.
- Under Intelligent time slot, choose how you want to manage time slots clients can book from:
- Regular time slots: Show all available time slots based on your time slot interval. This may create gaps in your calendar.
- Reduce calendar gaps: Intelligently show your clients plenty of slots while preventing them from creating gaps that are difficult to fill.
- Eliminate calendar gaps: Only show slots before and after existing appointments and blocked time. This may limit your online availability.
- Click on the Save button in the top right to update your settings.
Once updated, your online booking availability will reflect your new settings. You can update this using the same steps.
FAQs
- The team member doesn’t have scheduled shifts during that time.
- The selected service is not bookable online.
- The team member doesn’t provide the selected service.
- The team member has blocked time or time off.
- The service duration doesn’t fit into the available time slot.
- The service requires a resource (e.g. a room or chair) that isn’t available.
- The online booking optimization settings are limiting the visible slots.
- If the entire day is free, all available time slots are shown based on your chosen time interval.
- If there are appointments or blocked times in the middle of the day, only time slots at the end of the day, as well as before and after those existing bookings, will be offered.
Reduce calendar gaps: This setting tries to minimise gaps between appointments but still offers clients flexibility in choosing from a wider range of time slots.
Eliminate calendar gaps: This setting strictly avoids any gaps between appointments. Clients will only see time slots that fit perfectly after or before existing bookings, helping to keep the schedule as compact and efficient as possible.
Fresha takes processing time into account when showing available time slots. For example, if a service lasts 1 hour with 15 minutes of processing time, the system treats it as 1 hour and 15 minutes when suggesting time slots.
This may create a short gap before the next booking, especially near the end of a team member’s shift. For instance, if the team member's shift ends at 9:30 PM, the last available slot may be shown at 8:15 PM instead of 8:30 PM so they have time to finish the appointment, check out the client, and close up properly.
If certain time slots aren’t appearing, it may be due to one or more of the following reasons:
When using Eliminate calendar gaps, the below options will take effect:
This helps keep the schedule smooth by avoiding gaps between bookings.