Fix issues that unexpectedly reduce the number of appointment slots visible to clients

If your scheduler is showing fewer available appointment times than you expect, review the steps below. This guide covers troubleshooting steps for ensuring your availability is accurate and up-to-date.

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.

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 the missing appointment slots are too far in the future

You can use your scheduling limits to decide how far in the future clients can book. If your availability looks fine, then cuts off at a specific date, check the Maximum days scheduling limit.

Also, your scheduler won’t show any availability at all if your next available appointment is:

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 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.

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