Jan 12 2023 11:44 AM
I've recently started using MS Bookings where previously I was using Calendly. There are two things calendly did really well that seem different or missing from Bookings. I want to raise here to find out if this functionality is not available or if I've just misunderstood how to do it.
1. Time increments and availability
This is a weird one, Bookings seems to use the increments setting to also add a buffer at the beginning and end of the days bookable sessions. This feels weird to me. While there are settings that stop people booking in within say, 48 hours, what I'm looking for is a separate increments and buffer function. I've set my increments to 15mins, and with no calendar invite syncing that could be causing an issue, it adds the 15mins as a buffer to the beginning and end of the day's bookable times. For example, setting availability of 8:30am to 6:30pm I would expect to be able to book a session at 8:30am when availability starts, and the last session at 5:30pm, 1 hour before the end of the availability. However, Bookings shows 8:45am and 5:15pm and there doesn't seem to be a way to change this. Other services handled this sooo much better. This logic doesn't make sense to me - am I doing something wrong or has MS got the logic a bit wrong on this one?
2. I've seen mention of being able to have availability dictated by entries in the calendar of the linked staff account (provided you check the right box in settings). On other services, I could change a calendar event to 'Free' instead of busy, and this would then make those times available for someone to book over. This was really useful for syncing with my calendar and allowing some things to be booked over and others not by changing between 'Free' and 'Busy' status on each event. This doesn't seem to work - am I doing something wrong or is this feature missing?
Thanks in advance!
Jan 15 2023 05:46 AM
Hi @TomCrooky
Regarding the first one, you have an buffer set in your Outlook Settings. You can change this in the web app by changing the buffer which can be set in settings section of web app.
Regarding the second one,
Open Microsoft Bookings then your Bookings Calendar and change availability in Business Hours which will allow bookings based on the hours you choose(you can also setup times that are blocked as well).