Staff Availability

Staff availability is one person's working week, and the days they are not working at all. It sits alongside opening hours: the location says when the doors are open, this says who is actually there.

Somebody with no rules here cannot be booked at any time. Everybody who takes appointments needs a working week set, or the types they are assigned to offer no slots at all. This used to work the other way round — no rules meant "whenever the location is open" — which quietly undid the feature: bookings were being handed to people with no hours while the appointment page reported the employee free.

Nobody had to do anything on the day that changed. Everybody already assigned to an appointment type was given the working week their location keeps, so availability carried on exactly as it was, with the rows now visible and editable on this screen. The exception is a location with no opening hours at all: it could not be booked before either, so nothing was invented for it.

Where to look when a type offers nothing #

The Bookable column on Appointment Types is the fastest answer. It distinguishes the two ways a type can offer no times:

• No — no staff assigned. Nobody can take it. Add staff to the type.
• No — nobody has working hours. Staff are assigned, but not one of them has a working week set here. Add their hours below.

The appointment type's own page says the same thing under Staff who can take this, and an appointment assigned to somebody with no hours says so under Scheduling clash rather than claiming the employee is free.

The regular week #

Open Appointments → Staff Availability → Add availability, pick the person, pick a Day of Week, and set when they start and finish. One row per working day: somebody who works Tuesdays and Thursdays has two rows and is offered on no other day.

• Both times are required on a working row. A row that is not marked Not working has to say when the person starts and when they finish — a rule with no times decides nothing. Type them with the AM/PM (9:00 AM, 5:00 PM); an incomplete time is refused on the page rather than saved as a blank.
• Personal hours narrow the branch's, they never extend them. A person marked available 08:00–20:00 at a site that closes at 17:00 is still finished at five.
• The whole appointment has to fit inside the shift. A technician who finishes at 17:00 is not offered a two-hour job at 16:00, whatever time the branch shuts. Any buffers on the appointment type count towards that too.

Time off #

Leave Day of Week blank, set Date From and Date To, and turn on Not working. That takes the person out of the diary entirely for those dates and the public booking page stops offering them — a week's holiday used to keep selling itself.

Date-range rules beat the weekly pattern, so a holiday closes a day the person would normally work without you having to edit their week.

The same shape covers a one-off: set both dates to the same day.

What it does not do #

This is availability for booking, not a timesheet or a leave-approval system — there is nothing to approve and nothing is counted against an allowance. It exists to stop customers being offered times nobody can keep.