MS Bookings has a lot of potential for staff in the office to have one consolidated calendar for appointments. One feature missing is the inability for staff to schedule recurring appointments for customers. While this feature shouldn't be available for the customers, it should be available for staff to document recurring PT, counseling sessions, etc. Having to manually enter a session every 2 weeks for 4 months is definitely a hinderance to utilizing the full capability of the product.
23 Comments
- xicCopper Contributor
I don't understand how weekly recurring is the only option still in 2025. We want fortnightly or monthly occuring services, with the ability to randomly schedule an extra session if its needed. Crazy this still hasn't been implemented.
- RealityMixerCopper Contributor
Hi Cooper - Is weekly recurring an option in Microsoft Bookings? I've not seen this. Could you let me know where the option can be found? Many thanks!
- xicCopper Contributor
When you are creating a service, under availability options you can set custom available hours that occur weekly. So we have a service that only runs from 2-3pm each week for example.
We unfortunatley want fortnightly or monthly, so have to do a really annoying workaround using a dummy staff member that has limited availability and monitoring bookings manually.
- RealityMixerCopper Contributor
My tech team has spent ages developing a Power App specifically because Bookings does not allow the option of recurring appointments. We will be starting to use this in September (and hoping it works!). As an educational institution, we need a bookings app that will allow up to 6 weeks of coaching sessions to be booked by a student or staff member. Not having this feature means that the coach has to manually change an initial booking into a 6-week booking. Since they rarely have the option to do this immediately, other bookings are made which overlap with the six-week service, causing 'double bookings' and a lot of trouble! Hence the time and effort of developing a Power App. This should be an easy thing for MS to implement in their Bookings app.
- rbodnerCopper Contributor
This is a necessary update to the service. Please make this happen.
- ColinBaCopper Contributor
It is the only thing that keeps me looking for an alternative
- Paul BedfordCopper Contributor
We've just started using Bookings and were very surprised admins and schedulers did not have this option available to them.
- rbodnerCopper Contributor
agreed
- Hightower840Copper Contributor
I have found a way to use Bookings, and set up a Recurring Meeting.
Book your time in Bookings. Once the event has been added to your calendar, right click the entry in the calendar, an select "Duplicate". You can then use the options in the pop up window to make the entry recur on a schedule you choose, until an end date you choose. Make sure you save by clicking "Send" in the upper left. This blocks the time in Bookings, and places a recurring entry in the Calendar.
- IAMDYCopper Contributor
ownthecall we've had to use that as a workaround for a while now but it only serves to blockout the time from being booked. So we might as well just use a calendar then, and forget the "booking" aspect. Sucks that there's been no need or want to fix this.
- ownthecallCopper Contributor
After arriving at the same question others have here, I learned today the Bookings app is linked to the Outlook Calendar. I'd use the Outlook Calendar to book re-occuring events. Separately, I'd use the Bookings app to allow to the public to access a (public) calendar, but those bookings will also appear in the Outlook Calendar. For example, in the image attached, the 8 AM item is a weekly re-occuring event I created in Outlook Calendar, while the 10 AM item was booked by someone else via the Booking app.
This seems to be what people here are asking for. Hope this helps.
- zsuraskiCopper Contributor
I supervise my university's accessible van service, and we're trying to transition away from paper schedules. We've been limited for quite some time, as we can't get the approval to use any other scheduling service. Since the university already has contracts with Microsoft, this seems to be our only option, but recurring bookings are a necessity. Almost every other 3rd party service we've looked at has the option to do something like that, I can't imagine why Bookings doesn't.
- ZosnerCopper Contributor
Come on, bring on recurring appointments, please. A very common need.