Fix issues that unexpectedly reduce the number of appointment slots visible to clients
This guide covers troubleshooting steps for ensuring your availability is accurate and up-to-date.
Use this guide if your scheduler is showing fewer available appointment times than you expect, or if it's showing no available appointment times at all. If no spots are displaying for clients, your scheduler will display the message "Online scheduling is not currently available. Please contact the business directly."
Review the steps below to address common availability issues.
Check your availability
Verify your availability is entered as expected, paying particular attention to whether each time entered is AM or PM.
Check your appointments are public
If you're seeing no open times at all, it's possible that all of your appointment types are set to private. If this is the case, you can either send clients direct links or set your appointment types to public.
Check if the Look Busy or Minimize Gaps settings are enabled
Look Busy and Minimize Gaps are features that deliberately hide some of your availability. If Look Busy is enabled, the chosen proportion of available appointment slots will be hidden, and are chosen at random. If Minimize Gaps is enabled, Acuity will hide appointment slots that, if booked, would leave you with awkward gaps between your appointments. If you’re having trouble with availability and either of these features is enabled, start by disabling it and checking if the problem is resolved.
Ensure your classes are being offered
After you create classes, you have to manually add class times to your calendar. Until you do, clients can’t book into your new class. This doesn’t apply to non-class appointment types.
When you add a class to your calendar, clients can't book other appointments at the same time on that calendar.
Look for blocked time
If there’s a specific day and time that you’re not finding the availability you expected, check your Acuity calendar for blocked time. Click the day in question to verify there isn’t a time block covering your availability. That could be blocked time someone has added manually, or events syncing over from your third-party calendar.
Check for resources
You can use resources to limit the number of appointments happening at one time across multiple calendars. If you don't have enough resources available for an appointment, clients won't be able to book the appointment on your scheduler. Change the number of available resources or delete them to ensure all available appointments display.
Check if your first availability is past your template's limit
Your scheduler won’t show any availability at all if your next available appointment is:
- More than 18 months in the future, if you’re using the monthly template.
- More than 90 days in the future, if you're using the the daily template.
If that’s the case, you can manually book appointments for your clients or send your clients a dynamic link with the date and time pre-entered.
Check your scheduling limits
There are two scheduling limits for how far into the future clients can book, one in calendar scheduling limits and one in global scheduling limits.
First, check your global scheduling limits:
- In Acuity, click Availability.
- Click Global Scheduling Limits.
- Review the Maximum Days setting.
Calendar scheduling limits override the global scheduling limits. If a global scheduling limit doesn't explain your problem, check your calendar scheduling limits:
- In Acuity, click Availability.
- If you have multiple calendars, click the calendar you want to check to expand the calendar details.
- Click Edit Availability/Limits, then click Calendar Scheduling Limits.
- On the left side of the panel, review the days in the future setting.
Check if the missing appointment slots are too close
Your scheduling limits also include a minimum number of hours before an appointment for booking. Open slots that are closer than this limit won’t display on your scheduler. You can still book into these slots manually.
Consider appointment duration
Acuity will only show clients time slots that are long enough to fit the kind of appointment they’re booking. So if a client tries to book a 35-minute appointment, and the only open time on Monday is a 30-minute gap between existing appointments, they won’t be shown any available time slots on Monday.
This calculation includes any padding you’ve added to appointments. So a one-hour appointment with five minutes of padding won’t fit in a one-hour gap.
Verify appointments per time slot
Your scheduling limits include a setting (appointments per time slot) that governs how many appointments can happen at one time. If you’ve set this to 0, all client scheduling is prevented. Changing it to a different number (we suggest 1, unless you have a specific use case in mind) will enable online booking.
Consider availability and scheduling limits by appointment type
This applies if you’ve enabled availability and scheduling limits by appointment type and allow more than one appointment per time slot. After a client books an appointment from one of your availability groups, clients can only book overlapping appointments from the same availability group.
If a client books an appointment from one availability group, then another client tries to book an appointment from a different availability group, any time slots that overlap with the first appointment will be hidden.
Check for automatic start time intervals
Your start time interval is the time between the appointment slots that Acuity offers to clients when you're available. For example, if you're available starting at 1 PM with a 15-minute start time interval, the first four appointment slots offered would be 1 PM, 1:15 PM, 1:30 PM, and 1:45 PM.
By default, Acuity will calculate a custom start time interval for each calendar or appointment availability group based on your appointment type durations.
If the automatically calculated interval doesn't work well for you, you can manually set a different interval.
None of these solved my issue
If you've worked through the steps above and haven't solved your issue, please gather the following information:
- An appointment type that isn't showing the availability you expect.
- A date in the future when your availability isn't showing correctly.
- What availability you expect for that date.
Then, please contact us with that information for further assistance.