How to avoid double-booking appointments
Only free times are offered, and a request holds its time from the moment it is sent.
Management for business
Overlapping appointments are one of the commonest headaches of a manually kept schedule. 4appointments reduces them by offering clients only free times and by holding a time as soon as a request arrives.
The public booking page works out free times from each provider’s weekly schedule, exceptions and blocks, and from the bookings that already exist. A time that is taken by the same provider is not offered. Different providers can, of course, be booked at the same time.
A booking request holds its time even while it is pending. This means a second client cannot take the same slot while you are still deciding. If two people try to take the same time together, only one succeeds and the other sees a message that the slot was just taken.
In the service settings you can set a pause, labelled “Interval (min)”, which is added after bookings, for example for cleaning or preparation. It is taken from the service being booked now and it applies to the public page, not to bookings entered by your team.
When your team creates a booking in the panel, the system checks the provider’s availability and any overlaps, and also the busy blocks imported from external calendars. Those blocks come from calendar links in ICS format that you subscribe to, refreshed about every 15 minutes. There is no two-way synchronisation.
To take yourself off the calendar, add a block or an exception under “Availability”. A pending request that nobody confirms or rejects is cancelled automatically about an hour after the end of the requested time, and that frees the slot again. For that reason it pays to check your pending list regularly.
Key points
- ✓Only free times are shown to clients on the public page
- ✓A pending request holds its time until it is confirmed, rejected or expires
- ✓Pauses added after bookings leave room for preparation
- ✓Busy blocks can be imported from an external calendar by ICS link
Frequently asked questions
What happens if two clients book at exactly the same moment?+
Only one request gets the slot. The other client sees a message that the slot was just taken and can choose another time.
Can I block a time manually?+
Yes. Under “Availability” you can mark a provider as blocked for a period, for example a break, a holiday or an internal meeting, and it will no longer be offered to clients.
Does it handle group sessions with several participants?+
No. Each booking takes one slot with one provider for one service. Group classes with a capacity are not supported.
Related guides
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