Set booking constraints

If you allow more than one booking per user, a “Quantity” field will appear in the booking dialog, letting users specify, for example, how many seats they want to reserve.

If you allow users to make multiple bookings for the same time period, then they can also create multiple bookings for the same slot. This can be useful to allow a user to make a booking for friends with their own user account.

By default, capacity information is visible to all users. If you choose to hide it, information on whether a slot is available is shown instead.

You can adjust the capacity for each slot individually when creating or editing it on the Supervise > Overview tab, regardless of the default capacity. To set a slot with unlimited capacity, enter a hyphen (‘-’) in the capacity field. If you simply want to display a slot without allowing bookings, set the capacity to 0.

Overbooking can be restricted to superusers and the administrator or allowed for all users of your schedule. In case of the latter, you can choose to put users on the waiting list automatically or leave it up to users themselves whether they want to be put on the waiting list.

You can choose whether users from the waiting list will get placed automatically once another booking gets cancelled or whether you will do this manually.

A user who gets placed on the waiting list will be notified according to the general notification settings. Provided email notifications are enabled, users will also receive an email confirmation upon being placed.

Note that upon enabling the waiting list feature, an additional setting will appear under Require payment or approval? on the Configure > Process page; this setting allows waitlisted users to pay upon placement rather than upon booking.

In case of a Resource schedule, you can choose from three ways to determine reservation length. You can choose to let users determine start and finish times, work with fixed lengths or let it depend on the resource or service selected from a drop-down menu, the so-called ‘length selector’.

Apart from a default length, the first option also allows you to enforce a minimum and maximum length. Furthermore, the Buffer time field can be used to schedule some time between subsequent bookings, for example because you need some time to clean up between two appointments.

When using the fixed length option, the default length field is used to specify the length of every booking made. You may also want to specify some time between two subsequent bookings, using the Buffer time field.

Upon selecting the third option, a new text area will appear where each of the options for the length selector must be entered as a separate line. Such a line may consist of a short description of the resource/service, followed by a duration in H:MM or D:HH:MM format. Optionally, you can also add a price (see also Setting prices). Note that this feature uses one of the two available customizable fields of the schedule.

The Service schedule does not have a standard length for reservations, unlike the other two schedules. When you create a service on the Configure > Services page, you must manually set a length for each service. Each service can have a different length. If you leave the duration box empty, the service cannot be created or saved. The duration can be set in days, hours, or minutes, using the format D:HH:MM. The length of each service will be displayed on the schedule when users have to select the service they want to book.

Besides giving each service a length, you can also choose to add buffer times and decide whether multiple reservations can take place at the same time.

With start time constraints you can either specify start times explicitly, i.e. 9:00 AM, 9:30 AM, 10:00 AM, etc., or provide a so-called ‘pattern’. The pattern *:00, *:20, *:40, for example, would allow new bookings to start every hour, on the hour, as well as 20 and 40 minutes past.

By selecting Start constraints differ per day an additional field appears where you can specify when appointments can start each day. If you combine multiple schedules then the start constraints of the schedules will be logically combined as well, allowing for some truly complex patterns. You could use this to change the start time to be different on a single day, for example. This option is not available when you round times to whole days.

The option Only reveal the first available start time for each day will make a single open spot available at a time. This forces people to make adjacent bookings which prevents open holes in the schedule, a concept sometimes referred to as “cluster booking”. When an appointment is cancelled that space will first open up to fill the gap. As administrator, you will still be able to click the start time and manually adjust it to book anywhere.

When you don’t use start time constraints, appointments can potentially start anywhere. In that case you may consider setting an appropriate rounding time. That way you can avoid that users book irregular times like 12:07 to 12:23, which would leave your schedule full of holes. When you use the rounding times feature in combination with start time constraints, only the finish time will be rounded.

When you select Round times to the nearest day, the user interface will omit displaying hours and minutes. This is useful for multi-day events, like renting out a vacation home, where it wouldn’t be appropriate to specify a time in minutes. You can further restrict the times during which clients can book by specifying your opening hours and adding special days such as national holidays and vacations. This can be done via Supervise > Opening Hours / Special Days.