Limit gaps in schedule!!

[HArmstrongSP]

I have certain hours for appointments but am technically only by appointment.. Some days, I will have someone book a 10am appointment and then my next one will not be until 4pm. It would be REALLY nice if we could somehow minimize these gaps so I am not sitting here all day or paying staff to be here with no appointments.

[Foy1ct]

Yes please do this!!

[RADBeauty]

YES. There have been SO many feature requests for this over the years and still doesn't exist. I like 45 minutes away from my shop so having days that I sit there doing nothing for 4 hours because some booked the first appt of the day and someone else booked the last appt is just infuriating.

[Adeleah]

I will personally go in and block time at start and/or end of day to avoid large gaps ( ie, I have a guest at noon I block my morning up until 11:30 and from 2 on. Thus forcing them to be together.)

What I struggle with, is I offer a variety of services of different durations and utilize the “look busier” function but I’ll have an hour opening and it will allow someone to book a half hour appt in the middle of it leaving 15 min on either side. I wish it would only offer said service directly touching another service. I’ll end up having to contact clients on either side asking them to move their appt earlier or later so that I can create space for more appointments. This causes me to spend an hour+ communicating and hopefully receiving responses cooperating OR costing me hundreds of dollars. Attached is a screenshot example of a recent occurrence.

 

[johnson_1320]

You can also block manually within the day instead of the look busy option. Curious if you found a solution that works for you.

[riftfit]

It is absolutely ridiculous that this feature is not available. I don’t understand why so many basic functions of Appointments require numerous layers of workarounds in order to get the software to function the way that it should. Isn’t the point of an online booking system to free up the business owner’s time by allowing customers to book their own appointments? Just like @Adeleah said, I should not need to manually adjust my schedule and communicate with clients about adjusting their start time, if I wanted to waste my time doing that I would still be using pen and paper to schedule my appointments and not use an online booking system at all! Even if there was a way to restrict booking times to require a certain number of appointments to be scheduled back to back prior to allowing a gap to be created and a way to restrict the size of the gap that could be created by a customer booking online would be incredibly useful. For example, if there was a way to ensure that clients could only book at 10:15am creating a 15 minute break in my schedule after three appointments were already booked at 7am, 8am, and 9am without any gaps, but then the next three appointments would also need to occur back to back at 10:15am, 11:15am, and 12:15pm, before the next appointment booking could create another gap in my schedule, rather than customers having the ability to book into any open spot and creating the need for me to monitor my schedule constantly to manually block off or unblock time to avoid getting a break between every appointment that either doesn’t allow a different appointment to be booked during that time or results in an overall restriction of the number of appointments I can have in one time period. Having a small gaps in my day once in a while to give me a chance to complete an admin task or have a short break, but no service provider should have to be in a situation like what @Adeleah described here and the customer’s ability to book whatever start time they want should NEVER compromise the business’s ability to be profitable. 

[cb90]

So ridiculous this hasn't been done yet. This has been brought up for YEARS. Come on square!