Managing availability and calendars

Decide when clients can book, edit, or cancel appointments.

Before you start booking appointments, you need to set your availability, which is when clients can book time with you. This can be done by you, or any contributor with access to your Acuity account. You can also set limits on how and when appointments are scheduled, and add and edit multiple calendars. Each calendar has its own hours of availability.

If you get started and decide you want more hands-on help setting up Acuity Scheduling, you can hire a vetted expert.

Tip: Register for our webinar Preparing to book: Customizing and sharing your Acuity schedule where we'll teach you how to adjust availability and scheduling limits to get the most out of Acuity.

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How appointments work

When clients view your scheduler, several settings work together:

• Availability represents the times that you’re available for clients.
• Appointment type duration is the length of time the appointment takes.
• Scheduling limits, which are settings that restrict bookings, such as having a maximum number of appointments per week.

After taking all of these settings into consideration, a list of available times will appear on the scheduler. 

Set and customize your availability 

Depending on your schedule, you can set regular weekly hours, or set different hours for each day. You can also divide your calendar into appointment type groups with their own availability settings and scheduling limits. This is useful if you only offer some services at specific times. 

Here are more ways to customize your availability:

• Control appointment start times with Start time intervals
• Hide appointments with the Look busy setting 
• Add blocked time to your calendar
• Include gaps between appointments with padding

Learn more about setting and editing your basic availability. 

Edit global and calendar scheduling limits

Scheduling limits decide how far in advance clients can book appointments, if they can reschedule or cancel their appointments, and more. 

There are two kinds of scheduling limits:

• Global limits - apply account-wide.
• Calendar limits - apply to specific calendar, or to a specific group of appointment types on a calendar if you’re using availability and scheduling limits by appointment type.

Some scheduling limits are available as both global and calendar scheduling limits. For these settings, the calendar scheduling limit will override the global scheduling limit, but only for that calendar.

Learn more about limiting when clients can book or change appointments. 

Add and manage calendars 

Each calendar represents a separate set of hours when clients can book appointments. Some small businesses only need one calendar. If you have multiple staff members or locations, you can create individual calendars for them. 

The number of calendars you can add depends on your Acuity plan:

Use resources

You can use resources to limit the number of appointments that can be booked at one time. Resources are useful when an appointment type requires equipment or space. This limit applies across all calendars. 

When you create a resource, you specify the quantity and which appointment types require it. When a client books an appointment that uses a resource, one less resource is now available for that time slot. When a resource amount reaches zero for a time slot, clients can't book any more appointments that use the resource in that time slot. 

Advanced availability options

Using Acuity Scheduling's various availability settings, you can optimize your scheduler for your unique business needs. For example, you might want to pool availability for your calendars, or maybe your appointments require an installation time or delivery window, so you need to offer time-window-based appointments. With the hours every-other-week setting, you can set up an alternating schedule or choose to set repeating hours. 

Review our recommended solutions for more examples of custom setups. 

Troubleshooting availability 

If your calendar is showing unexpected times or no times at all, review the list of settings in Troubleshooting availability in Acuity Scheduling. If the issue persists, contact Acuity Scheduling Customer Support.