Scheduling: Managing availability

How to manage your availability and when people can book sessions with you

Whether you have integrated Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Apple Calendar or not, you need to let Introwise know when you are available to have sessions.

Introwise lets you define your availability on a recurring basis, and with one-time availability periods.

User on the Growth and the Pro plans also have an ability to define multiple availabilities, and set different availabilities for different services.

When you set up an Introwise account, your availability will automatically be set from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday.

Updating your availability

To update your availability follow these steps:

  1. Go to Scheduling and scroll down to the section Your availability
  2. Pick the availability that you want to update and click on it
    Note: by default you have one availability named "Working hours", see below how to add and rename availabilities
  3. You will be taken to a calendar where you can edit your availability
  4. Click on the day of the week you want to add availability. Set the time you want to be available for sessions.
    Mark the time period as Recurring to automatically repeat it every week on the same day of the week.
    Tip: you can click-and-drag on the calendar with use your mouse to quickly create an availability period.
  5. Repeat the previous step to add multiple availability periods on the same or other days
  6. To delete availability time, simply click on time block. You will have an option to either edit it and save, or delete the time block completely.

Your changes are automatically saved when editing your availability and are applied immediately to your booking calendar.

Setting scheduling buffers, minimum and maximum notice times

To better control your schedule you can set time buffers between sessions, and rules on how far in the future clients can book sessions with you, or how much advance notice is required.

To set your scheduling rules please follow these steps:

  1. Go to Scheduling and scroll down to the section Scheduling rules
  2. Click Manage rules
  3. Set your buffers and notice times:
    1. Buffer before - duration that should remain free before a booked session
    2. Buffer after - duration that should remain free after a booked session
    3. Minimum notice - how early in the future a session can be booked
    4. Maximum days in the future - how far in the future a session can be booked

Buffers and notice times apply to all your availabilities. When showing available time slots to your clients Introwise will take into account your events on connected calendars when reserving buffer time before and after a session.

Adding time off

When you're working on a regular schedule sometimes you might need to prevent bookings during certain dates or hours, for example when you have a planned vacation.

Introwise allows you to block time periods from appearing as available on your calendar accross all your services by easilly setting time off periods in a single place.

To manage your time off periods:

  1. Go to Scheduling and scroll down to the section Scheduling rules
  2. Click Manage time off
  3. To add a time off click Add time off, set the Start and End times and click Save
  4. Your newly created time off will appear in the list
  5. To edit or delete a time off period click on that period in that list and make the changes or click Delete to delete it

If you need to create and manage multiple time off periods you can also use the calendar view of your time off by clicking on View as calendar

Adding and managing multiple availabilities

Sometimes not all of your services should be available for booking during the same time periods. For example you might want to offer your paid services every day 9 to 5, free discovery sessions only on Fridays, and have some specific availability times for your specific clients.

Introwise allows you to set multiple availabilities and easily assign and reuse them accross different services. This feature is available on the Growth plan and up.

To create new availability:

  1. Go to Scheduling and scroll down to the section Your availability
  2. Click on Add new availability
  3. Give your new availability a descriptive name to help you identify it among others
  4. Click Save
  5. Your new availability is created and is ready to be set up. Follow the steps outlined in the section Updating your availability above to set times when you're available

You can also clone any availability to sped up it's creation:

  1. Go to Scheduling and scroll down to the section Your availability
  2. Click on the availability that you want to clone
  3. Across the availability name click on Clone
  4. Give your new availability a descriptive name and click Save
  5. Your newly created availability will contain the same recurring availability periods as the one that you've cloned it from

To rename or delete an availability:

  1. Go to Scheduling and scroll down to the section Your availability
  2. Click on the availability that you want to clone
  3. Across the availability name click on Rename or Delete
  4. If you attemp to delete an availability that is being used in some services, Introwise will warn you about that. If you proceed with deleting such availability, all the services that were using it will be set to use your default availability.

You can always see which services are currently using a particular availability by clicking on a button Used in X services on that availability settings page.

Troubleshooting

A time period is marked as available but there are no time slots on my booking page at that time

If you don't see a time slot displayed, it's usually caused by one of these:

  1. A minimum notice setting is applied. Please check some dates in the future, and adjust your minimum notice time if needed.
  2. An event on the connected calendar conflicts with that time period. Check your connected calendars for possible time conflicts, including all-day and multi-day events. If you don't want some event to block your availability, you can mark it as "Free" in your calendar, or adjust Introwise calendar sync settings to ignore that calendar.
  3. Some other session on Introwise is already scheduled for that time. Check you Introwise sessions dashboard for possible conflicts, including group sessions that could overlap with that time.
  4. Buffer rules makes it impossible to fit a slot in that time period. Check events on your connected calendars and your sessions on Introwise that are scheduled close to the desired time. If needed, adjust your buffer times, or increase your available time to accommodate the slot duration and buffers.