No more double bookings or clashes with a personal schedule on your booking system. SuperSaaS allows you to customize your appointment booking availability, manage the booking hours and allows you to work with multiple calendars together. In this blog post, we explain the different ways to customize and display availability in SuperSaaS.
- Setting up availability
- Control how availability is displayed and applied on your schedule
- Managing your availability with multiple calendars
Setting up availability
1. Set your recurring weekly availability on the schedule
Manage your working days and opening hours during which you want your schedule to be available. You can select on which days you want to accept bookings, and also add the off days for you or the organization. Next, enter the opening hours for each day individually.
It’s impractical to stay available during the whole day when you also want to take into consideration the lunch hours of the day or set aside only a few hours each day for other work. You can take this into account by splitting the opening hours on your schedule.
You can set your availability via Schedule Name > Supervise > Opening Hours as shown:
2. Manage availability for specific dates
You may have important commitments on certain days, upcoming holidays, or maybe you simply want to block off some time slots from your schedule. Manage these exceptions by completely closing the schedule or by creating different working hours for these specific dates (or date range).
You can add such exceptions to the system via Schedule Name > Supervise > Special days > Add new exception as shown:
When you click on the “Create Exception” button you can view your special days listed under “Availability Exceptions” on the same page above this box.
Note: It is possible to delete any/all of these exceptions by simply clicking on the red cross button on the ride side of each special day exception.
3. Limit your availability date range
By default, your schedule is open for bookings for an indefinite time period. You can edit this time frame depending on your individual requirements. When you’re managing a special event, workshop or session available only between certain dates, you can choose to open your schedule during a specific time interval only.
You can limit the schedule availability during a given time interval via the Schedule Name > Supervise > Opening Hours tab as shown:
This would make your schedule inaccessible to users outside the available date range.
4. Manually block certain time slots on your schedule
Sometimes, you may want to block off certain time slots or certain days on your schedule. There are multiple ways to block out time on your schedule. One of the easiest ways to block certain time slots or days on your schedule is to fill up the time with a booking of your own. As an administrator, you’re not bound to limits, so you can easily make a booking which is several days long (and avoid all time constraints).
In order to create a booking which is several days long, you can simply click on Schedule Name > Use and click on the schedule to create the booking. Here’s an example of a booking which is several days long:
This type of booking counts as a single booking in the system and counts towards your total.
Other ways to block off time include creating exceptions for special days, adjusting the opening hours of your schedule temporarily and syncing your SuperSaaS schedule with Google calendar. These ways allow you to block off time on your schedule without reducing the bookings from the total booking limit available in your account.
Control how availability is displayed and applied on your schedule
5. Manage the hours visible on your schedule
Meetings can take up most of your day, and erratic meeting schedules can hamper your productivity. Even though you cannot change the working hours, you can definitely encourage users to create an appointment within certain hours. You can achieve this by managing the hours visible on your booking schedule.
You can control the hours visible on your schedule via the Schedule Name > Configure > Layout tab as shown:
Please Note: Visible hours differ from the opening hours on your schedule. Visible hours are the hours visible on your schedule to your users, while the opening hours are the hours during which you want to accept bookings on your schedule.
6. Allow users or superusers to create bookings outside the opening hours
Use the information about opening hours to make your schedule visually appealing. For your user’s convenience, you can allow them to book an appointment outside the opening hours.
You can allow bookings outside opening hours via Schedule Name > Configure > Opening Hours as shown below:
Instead, if you only want to limit this feature to the admin and the staff members on your team (superusers in the system), you can choose this option via Schedule name > Supervise > Opening Hours as shown:
7. Ensure all appointments fall between your opening hours
Don’t end up frustrated when the appointment end time falls outside your opening hours. Ensure the system only accepts appointments within the opening hours.
You can achieve this via Schedule Name > Supervise > Opening Hours as shown:
Managing your availability with multiple calendars
8. Avoid clashes with personal commitments by sync with Google calendar
No more double bookings or official appointments clashing with your personal commitments. Simply sync your Google calendar with your SuperSaaS schedule and avoid overlapping appointments. Follow this quick video tutorial to set up your sync with Google calendar:
Read our previous blog post, we explained how to get instant updates from your SuperSaaS schedule to your Google calendar.
9. Keep all calendars up to date by adding your appointment details from SuperSaaS
Handling multiple calendars can quickly become tedious. You want to make it easier for you and your customers to sync the appointment details to other calendar programs. You can easily add your SuperSaaS bookings to other calendars by exporting the appointments to other calendars.
Export each booking individually
You can export individual bookings by clicking on the appointment slot and then clicking on the small iCal button in the bottom right corner of the slot as shown:
When you open this iCal file in other calendar programs. The appointment information is directly added to your calendar.
Allow your customers to add the booking details to their calendar
Every time a user makes a booking, you can automatically attach the details in the notification as an iCal file. You can achieve this by using the magic word $ical in your notification messages.
Note: Magic words are auto text which automatically gets replaced by some dynamic value when the message is generated. You can find the complete list of magic words in our support documentation.
You can customize your messages to contain the iCal file via the Schedule Name > Configure > Layout tab as shown:
When you keep the default message, you can simply add the $ical magic word to the above box. Here’s an overview of how your confirmation message will appear to a Gmail user:
The email might appear in a different format for other email providers. However, the iCal file will always be attached to the email irrespective of the provider.
TIP: Read our blog post on customizing your email and text messages.
In addition to customizing your availability, you can also add advanced availability or booking constraints. You can find out more information about setting these booking constraints here.
For any specific questions about configuring your availability in SuperSaaS, feel free to contact us.