When setting up and managing the self-booking options for your individual services, there are a few factors that impact the availabilities that display in the portal.

If you think a certain date and time should be available but you aren't seeing it, you can check the date-selection step within the booking portal. Select the service from the service list in the main portal, or locate the service on your Services page, select its name, and open its direct link.

Information about the selected service's availability settings displays in a pop-up at the date/time selection step in the booking portal. This incudes information about the allowed booking window (whether global or service-specific) as well as the schedule of any user assigned to the service.

Selecting "(edit)" next to any of the listed settings opens the page on which users can adjust the associated setting.

Clicking on the calendar icon next to any assigned user opens the Schedule page pre-set with a filter for that user's appointments.

If you are still unsure about why certain appointment times are unavailable after reviewing that information, the following subsections further outline the different items that may be impacting booking availability for your individual services.

The booking window refers to a range of dates/times within which your clients are able to book. This setting can be configured globally and at the service level.

To check your global booking settings, click the gear icon in the bottom-left corner of the page.

The select "Client Self-Booking" in the "Product Configuration" section.

The booking window is dictated by the Minimum and Maximum fields found in the Booking Window section of this page.

Each service and series has the option to override the global booking window settings. Those service-specific settings can be found on the service/series' settings page. To check the settings for a specific service, navigate to your services list and click either the name or gear icon for the relevant service.

Then locate the "Custom Overrides" card, with the toggles for "Minimum booking window" and "Maximum booking window".

When the override toggles are turned ON (purple), additional fields will be present, indicating the service-specific settings for the minimum number of hours notice needed to book and the maximum number of days in advance that appointments can be booked.

Other bookings already on the calendar will also impact the availabilities listed for clients in the booking portal. For individual services, this can include bookings already associated with a service's assigned user(s) and those scheduled within the selected service's associated room(s).

To check for existing bookings at a specific date/time, navigate to your Resource Calendar view by hovering your mouse over the Schedule icon in the left-hand menu and selecting "Resource Calendar" from the menu.

This will open a calendar view with the dedicated daily schedules for each room and user on your account.

Alternatively, on the main Schedule page, use the "Filter by Location" and/or "Filter by Person/Pet" options to filter the visible appointments based on your needs.

When viewing your calendar, if it seems as though there may be some bookings missing, double check that you have no other filters set. Applied filters will display at the top of the calendar. To clear all applied filters at once, select "Clear All" next to the filter count.

Alternatively, to clear a specific filter, select the field then click "Deselect All" at the top of the filter's drop-down.

Individual services must have at least one user schedule assigned to them to enable client self-registration. These schedules can be configured to be as service-specific or as general as desired, and can all be found on the Time Tracking & Schedules page.

Additionally, each individual service lists all of its assigned schedules under "Availabilities" on its settings page. Clients self-booking an individual service will only be able to register for appointments that fall within the set availabilities of selected service's the assigned user(s).

The available appointment times will also be impacted by the scheduling options found on the "Time Slots" card on each individual service's settings page.

Note that the combination of the selected time slot interval and blocked time before/after bookings can result in larger blocks of time being removed from the list of available timeslots for clients going through the self-booking process.

i.e. Service A has a duration of 60 minutes. This means that one booking will block 60 minutes off on the calendar, preventing another client from self-booking with the same provider at that time. If the service is set with a time slot interval of every 1 hour, the time slots will display as 12:00pm, 1:00pm, 2:00pm, 3:00pm. Booking at 1pm will reduce those available spots to 12:00pm, 2:00pm, 3:00pm. If a blocked time of 15 minutes is added before and after the service, that will result in a time block within the user's availability from 12:45pm to 2:15pm. Since time intervals are shown hourly, and a 60 minute service booking starting at 12:00pm or 2:00pm would then conflict with the chosen blocked times for the service, the only remaining available time will be 3:00pm, and a full 3 hours will be removed from the service's availability list for clients that are self-booking.

A similar result can occur if an appointment is booked manually by a user on a different schedule than is usually available through the self-booking process.

i.e. Service B has a duration of 60 minutes and it set with a time slot interval of 1 hour. That means that, with no other bookings reducing availability, the time slots in the booking portal will display as 12:00pm, 1:00pm, 2:00pm, 3:00pm. If a user then manually schedules an appointment from 1:30pm to 2:30pm, both the 1:00pm and 2:00pm timeslots will be removed from the list of available times in the self-booking portal. This is because a 60 minute service booking starting at either 1:00pm or 2:00pm would conflict with the user-booked 1:30pm appointment.

Blocked time refers to time scheduled on the calendar that, while not associated with a specific appointment in BusyPaws, prevents clients from being able to book with one or more users. These blocked times may apply to a specific service/set of services, or to the entire service list, and may be set up manually in BusyPaws or result from a user's two-way Google Calendar sync. Much like existing bookings, blocked times prevent customers from self-registering for individual services by removing that timeslot from the availabilities listed in the booking portal.

Regardless of their source, blocked times will appear in grey on the calendar with some basic information about the user(s) to which it applies. They display only on the business' end and do not appear on any of the customer-facing calendars.

To check for blocked times that may be restricting client self-bookings at a specific date/time for a specific provider or room, hover your mouse over the Schedule icon in the left-hand menu bar then select "Resource Calendar" from the menu.

This will open a calendar view showing the dedicated daily schedules for each room and user on your account.

Alternatively, on the main Calendar page, use the "Filter by Person/Pet" and/or "Filter by Service" options to view only appointments and blocked times associated with the user and/or service of interest.

When viewing your calendar, if it seems as though there may be some bookings missing, double check that you have no other filters set. Applied filters will display at the top of the calendar. To clear all applied filters at once, select "Clear All" next to the filter count.

Alternatively, to clear a specific filter, select the field then click "Deselect All" at the top of the filter's drop-down.

If you have gone through your service's assigned schedules, existing appointments, blocked times, and booking window settings, and are still unsure about appointments you think are missing or those that are present when they shouldn't be, reach out to our team for assistance!