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 customers 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 customer 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 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 through ICS links, 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.
Points to remember
- ✓Only free times are shown to customers 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
Common questions
What happens if two customers book at exactly the same moment?+
Only one request gets the slot. The other customer sees a message that the slot was just taken and can choose another time.
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.
More guides for you
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