How availability is calculated

When a caller asks for an appointment, or a customer opens your booking page, Ringhum works out the free times on the spot. Your assistant and the booking page use the same calculation, so they never disagree. This article explains each rule, where you set it, and how they combine.

All times use your workspace time zone, which you set under Settings → Workspace → Workspace timezone.

Where the settings are

Most of the rules live under Company → Hours & booking. Click Save hours & rules after a change.

The rules, step by step

For each day, Ringhum applies these checks in order:

1. Closures. If the date is listed under Holidays & closures, the whole day is closed.
2. Opening hours. The day's time ranges are the only times that can be booked. A day with no range is closed. Add a second range for a lunch break, for example 9:00 to 12:00 and 13:00 to 17:00.
3. Same day. If Allow same-day bookings is off, today offers no times.
4. Booking horizon. Days further ahead than Book up to (days ahead) offer no times.
5. Minimum notice. Times that start sooner than Minimum notice (hours) from now are left out.
6. Candidate times. Start times are laid out from the opening of each range, one Slot length apart. A start time is only kept if the whole appointment, using the service's Duration, ends by the close of that range.
7. Existing appointments. Scheduled and confirmed appointments block their time, widened by the Buffer between (min) on both sides. Cancelled, completed and no-show appointments do not block anything.
8. Connected calendars. Busy times from calendars you connected under Integrations also block time. See Calendars and busy times.

Whatever is left is offered. On a call, the assistant offers a few of these times at once. On the booking page, customers see all of them for the day they pick.

Note: Slot length and duration are different things. Slot length is the gap between possible start times. Duration is how long the appointment lasts. A 45-minute service with a 30-minute slot length can start at 9:00, 9:30, 10:00 and so on.

Staff members

When a customer asks for a specific person:

• Only that person's own appointments block their times. Appointments for other people do not.
• Busy times from connected calendars still block everyone, because they apply to the whole workspace.
• If the person has their own working hours, those replace your opening hours for their bookings. Working hours per person can currently only be set through the API. Without them, your opening hours apply.

When the customer does not choose anyone (Anyone available on the booking page), every active appointment in the workspace blocks the time, whoever it is with.

Important: With Anyone available, your business can hold only one appointment at a time. If several people take appointments in parallel, ask customers to pick a person, and make sure each person is listed in Company → Team directory.

A worked example

Suppose you have these settings:

• Opening hours on Tuesday: 9:00 to 12:00 and 13:00 to 17:00
• Slot length: 30 min
• Buffer between (min): 15
• Minimum notice (hours): 2
• The service is 45 minutes long
• One appointment is already booked from 10:00 to 10:45

The existing appointment blocks 9:45 to 11:00 once the 15-minute buffer is added on both sides. For a 45-minute appointment, Tuesday offers:

If a customer asks at 8:30 on that Tuesday, the 2-hour minimum notice also removes 9:00, because it starts before 10:30.

Bookings that skip the rules

• Appointments you add by hand. Appointments → New appointment books the time you enter without checking availability, so you can overbook on purpose. The customer still gets a confirmation.
• Moving an appointment. Reschedule on an appointment checks that the new time is free and inside the opening hours. If not, you see "That time is not available."

Troubleshooting

The assistant says there are no free times, but the calendar looks empty. Check, in this order: the day is not under Holidays & closures, the day has opening hours, the date is within Book up to (days ahead), and the time is past Minimum notice (hours). Then check your connected calendars for busy events on that day.

A closure I set last year is not closing the day this year. A closure applies to one exact date. Add yearly holidays again for each year.

A long service never shows any times. The whole service must fit inside one opening range. A 120-minute service cannot be booked in a 9:00 to 10:30 range, and it does not run across a lunch break.

Two customers were booked at the same time. This happens when one booking has a staff member and the other does not, or when someone was added by hand under Appointments. See the staff section above.