Appointment calendar overlap

[BodyHarmony]

Hi.

Our one-person service has a main clinic location for most of the week, on 2 days per week we have a 2nd clinic location and we provide customer on-site services.

We have in Square currently the following Locations:

* main clinic

* 2nd clinic every second Wednesday

* mobile clinic for customer on-site

Question 1

I attempted to set up the calendar through Edit Availability for the 2 locations and got a staff schedule conflict.

At the moment we have every day at the main clinic available except Weds, and every day the 2nd clinic is unavailable except Weds. This is not well done as we have to reschedule clients to appropriate days at the clinics. If someone books at the 2nd clinic on a day it is not open, we have to call them & reschedule.

How may we set up the availability calendar so that every week day is available at the main clinic except for every 2nd Wednesday which are the only times the 2nd clinic is available?

Question 2

Is it possible to set up the mobile service in another way so that is not a separate Location? Perhaps as a service option that increases the time allocated for the service plus an additional fee to cover travel cost?

Question 3

Is it better to have the system with only one Location (the main clinic) and offer options for the booking for being at the 2nd clinic or the client's on-site?

Many thanks for your help, Peter.

[Seamus]

Hey again @BodyHarmony,

This sounds like a bit of a tricky one, but I'll do my best to work through possible solutions here!

1. I took a deeper dive into this one and it appears that the current system allows for scheduling on a weekly basis only. What you'd need here is the ability to do so on a fortnightly basis, which is unfortunately not a feature of Appointments at the moment.

2. Creating a seperate service for mobile that includes a different price or longer time frame is definitely one workaround you can try using here. A potential downside would be the inconsistency in travel time may result in overlaps for longer travel time or downtime for shorter travel time. You'd probably need to leave room for these appointments taking longer than expected.

3. This could potentially be a workaround, but I'm wondering how you would overcome a booking being made at the second clinic on a Wednesday it isn't open. You could always require approval for each booking, though this may still result in customers booking in a time you're not open and require booking a new time.

Things that may help:

• You could create a new team member to specifically assign to the 2nd clinic every second Wednesday - you could call it whatever makes sense, eg "2nd Clinic Staff" then limit the availability of that location to Wednesdays, and block out every second Wednesday as personal time for that staff member. A potential downside is that you'd need essentially create a "dummy" team member so its availability setting won't impact your actual team members, which means this won't provide tracking/sales attribution for the staff member who attends the appointment.
   
• I'm wondering if the "Appointments can’t be scheduled farther out than" option may come in handy in some capacity. This setting prevents customers from booking too far in advance, For example, clients can only request an appointment within a week of the service date and time. This may give you further flexibility in prepping your calendar for every second Wednesday. The downside is that the setting would block the ability for any service at any location to be booked beyond the chosen time frame. You can find this in the Appointments Settings.