Need to be able to adjust staff availability within date ranges

[rober1ba]

If anyone has a solution, I'd love to hear it!

In search of a way to adjust staff members’ varying work schedules without impacting availability of services. Here is the scenario. We set up a Bookings calendar for our university writing center. Two faculty are admins and nearly 50 students are bookable consultants. Business hours are standard, consultants’ availability hours are established on an individual basis per their work schedule, students in need of help can book appointments up to one week in advance. Everything worked great for 15 weeks of the semester. As finals week approaches (week 16), our consultants work schedules will vary greatly due to their exam schedules. We dug deep to find a way to make things work, but had no luck. Problem is, there is no way to adjust an individual consultant’s work schedule for a short period of time. So, if the consultant usually works 8-11am Monday through Friday during the regular semester, but she will need to work 1-4pm during exam week, there is no way to set that for a single week. We can only change her normal hours which impacts her immediate availability, not just during the week that it needs to be. This is a problem. We explored all options of “Time Off” service availability, etc. and came up with no good solution. For now, we have set up a completely separate Bookings calendar specifically for exam week. That calendar has the staff assigned to the work schedule just for that single week. On the web site, we had to have two links. Book here for appointments during first 15 weeks. Book here for appointments during exam week. Far from ideal. Would like to have an option to set staff member availability by week.

[#2]

We have the same problem. Our student staff has changing schedules each week and appointments can be booked more than one week ahead, so it is not possible to change the staff schedule in time. It would be necessary to have a 'Set different availability for a date range' option for staff members like in the 'edit service' menu.

[#3]

Our agency has the same issue for our counseling appointments. A general schedule works for most of the year, but in the instance that a counselor's availability changes for a particular period, there does not appear to be any solution native to the Bookings application.

With that said, I did theorize a solution, although it is rather labor intensive.
Our counselors have their Outlook calendar's connected to Bookings in order to avoid conflicts with staff meetings and other obligations. It would be possible to simply set recurring events on the staff member's personal calendars that block off all time periods EXCEPT for the intended appointment times. The service itself could then be opened up to all times during business hours, and the staff member's individual calendar would control their specific availability.
When that staff member's availability changes for a time period, the option to cancel those recurring time blocks for that particular time period could allow a different schedule that did not conflict with prior, or following weeks.

This does require that all staff have managed calendars, however, and depending on the size of your operation, that could become too time consuming to be worth the effort. It really would be best if an option to adjust availability for a specific time period (as currently exists for general business hours) was implemented on a staff availability level.