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Booking rules

Booking rules are the guardrails around your availability — how customers experience your calendar and how much slack your operation gets between bookings. Find them at Settings → Booking Setup and Business Setup.

Booking model & service defaults​

In Business Setup → Settings, choose what customers can book:

  • Resource rentals — spaces bookable on their own.
  • At-location services — services delivered at your location.
  • Mobile services — services delivered at the customer's address. Mobile bookings support saved client addresses, custom addresses, and virtual sessions; you can require an address before confirming and add travel buffers (minutes) before and after each mobile booking.

The Default booking type sets the first experience customers see when your public booking page opens. Turning a booking type off shows a confirmation dialog with the impact on your existing offerings.

Operating style​

Choose how customers pick a time:

  • Time slots — customers pick from the fixed durations you define per service.
  • Open time — customers select a start and end time on a grid.

This is a workspace-wide default that works alongside each service's own duration settings — see Creating services.

Minimums and notice​

  • Min booking (min) — the shortest booking a customer can make. The default is 60 minutes, stepped in 30s.
  • Min notice (hrs) — how many hours ahead a customer must book. Set it above zero to prevent same-day walk-ins from the public page.
  • Cancel window (hrs) — how far ahead of a booking customers can cancel without penalty. Works with deposits: cancelling inside the window keeps a non-refundable deposit.

Per-day capacity​

Max/day per space caps how many bookings a single space can take in a day. Leave it Unlimited for no cap. When the cap is reached, the space shows as fully booked for that day.

Buffers​

Buffers are minutes blocked around bookings so your operation has room to breathe. They're set in three places and combined into one effective buffer per booking:

  • Service — in the service editor's Availability Rules: a Preparation buffer (minutes blocked before each booking for setup) and a Cleanup buffer (after, for reset). Customers are never charged for buffer time.
  • Space — each space's Buffer minutes in Spaces & equipment.
  • Staff — each staff member's Buffer time in Staff.

The effective buffer takes the largest of the three (not the sum), so a sensible buffer on one level doesn't get tripled by the others.

Buffers make calendars look empty

Every buffer minute is time customers can't book. If availability feels sparse, review your largest buffer first — a 90-minute cleanup buffer is usually the culprit.

Checkout hold​

While a customer is mid-checkout, their chosen time is protected so nobody else takes it. Each service's Advanced Rules let you set the checkout hold: use the workspace default, or set a Custom checkout hold between 1 and 10 minutes (default: 10). Keep it short if your customers book fast and your slots are in demand.

Staff assignment timing​

For services that involve staff, Booking Setup controls when staff are assigned:

  • Assignment timing — At booking, or Assign later (the booking arrives with a Staffing needed state and you assign staff before the appointment).
  • Claim deadline (hours before start) — for deferred assignments, how close to the start time you can still assign someone; unclaimed bookings raise an alert.

See Staff for how staffing modes work.

Review policies at a glance​

Settings → Policies shows a read-only summary of each active service's guardrails side by side: buffer before and after, minimum advance notice, maximum booking window, and whether a waiver is required (with a preview of the waiver text). It's a quick way to audit your rules — to change them, edit the service itself in the Services workspace.