The name of the Appointment Type is visible on each screen of the booking process. Make sure to make this descriptive so the customer knows what they’re signing up for.

The length of the Appointment Type. How long you expect this service or event to take.

Units can be set to minutes, hours, days, or weeks. The duration is then displayed to your customer during the booking process as well.

When adding buffers, the appointment type length becomes the duration + buffers. BUT! It’s not noticeable when booking; it’s only considered in the plugin’s availability calculations.

The Label field is helpful for admins to color-coordinate their Appointment Types. Labels are associated with a color and a title. This is not displayed to your customer.

Learn more about using the Appointment Type Labels.

The slug is used to help with CSS changes and to specify shortcodes.

You won’t see the slug field when you’re first creating a new Appointment Type. The first save creates a slug for you based on the Name you chose. After that first save, you’ll be able to see and edit the slug field.

As a result, this is the Appointment Type’s unique identifier and is helpful to know when you’re making CSS edits.

Make sure you don’t use spaces or special characters other than the hyphen (-) when choosing a slug. This can cause unusual errors and behavior down the line.

The Booking Calendar associated with the Appointment Type can show the available dates in either a monthly or weekly view.

This can be a brief memo about appointment information for your customer. The confirmation page and email notifications will also show this message by default.

For more detailed instructions, we recommend you include those in the notification message instead.

You have two options for choosing start times – Available Blocks and Specific Start Times.

Choose the starting time intervals for bookings. Appointments can start on a 10, 15, 20, 30, or 60-minute interval.

A smaller interval will give you more precision in choosing when appointments can start. It will also let you book more appointments if your duration is short.

For example, if you have a duration of 10 minutes for an appointment type, then the 10-minute interval setting would let you open up to 144 single-capacity time slots in a day. While the 60-minute intervals would only let you open up to 24 single capacity time slots in a day.

While you can create Appointment Types with less than a 10-minute duration, you cannot set the Time Slot Interval to less than 10 minutes. However, we do offer a workaround for this.

Use the availability table to mark the times or blocks you’re available for appointments each week.

The hours in the day expand with the + button at the top and bottom of the hours column.

By default, the table sets the availability from Monday-Friday 9 AM – 5 PM, with one hour from noon to 1 PM for lunch.

When choosing your availability, please take the duration + buffers into consideration. If the blocks or specific start times are not long or wide enough to contain the duration + buffers, then the time slots will not appear.

Please see this guide if you have missing time slots or see ‘There are no available appointments’.

The availability window lets you choose a time range for when you’d like time slots to show. A customer looking at your Booking Calendar can only see time slots within these chosen dates.

If you don’t see this setting, then please visit the Advanced Scheduling Options guide to show you how to turn this setting on. And for more details on the Availability Window.

Lets you choose whether you’d like team members to be required for this type of appointment. Also, you can choose how (User Preference, Any, or All) and which team members can be selected.

The Team member(s) must be available for a customer to be able to book a time slot.

Find out more about how this setting works in our Team Booking guide.

The Capacity Type can either be Group or Individual. This just means how the bookings will be treated in the back-end and for the availability calculations.

• Individual bookings allow for overlapping bookings across different time slots.
• While Group bookings allow overlapping bookings only in the same time slot.

This refers to the max amount of overlapping appointments you’d like to have for each time slot.

Set the timezone associated with your booking calendar. This selection depends on whether your customers usually share a timezone with you (Locked). Or, if you tend to get customers from different places (Localized).

Locked

Locked lets your customers see time slots in your chosen timezone. This is recommended for in-person meetings and people with local customers.

If your customers are in the same timezone as you, they will not see any timezone-related messages or abbreviations within the booking calendar.

To change your local timezone, visit the SSA Settings tab > General Settings.

If your customers are in a different timezone than you, then they’ll see, “You are booking an appointment in timezone: …” and show them the local time for the booking calendar. Each time slot will also show the timezone abbreviation.

The buffers allow you to space out your appointments to give yourself time between meetings. Appointment Buffers can be set:

• Before: Makes sure you have time to prepare for the appointment
• After: Give yourself time to wrap up or handle bookings that run over the scheduled end time 

When two buffers overlap, only the larger of the two is used. For example, if your Before buffer is 15 minutes and your After buffer is 10, the buffer between these two bookings will end up being 15 minutes — not 25.

The buffers only help space out your bookings. The buffers don’t get included in the appointment duration and your customers won’t know they’re there.

The amount of time you need to take note of new appointments. Use this feature to avoid customers booking at the last minute.

If you’re using the Notice Required setting, no one will be able to book any time slots between now and the time you’ve chosen.

For example, if you choose 3 days, then you won’t see bookable time slots within the next 72 hours.

This limits how far into the future customers can book appointments. A customer looking at your Booking Calendar cannot see time slots beyond this chosen time.

For example, if you set this as 3 days, then customers won’t be able to see any bookable time slots beyond 72 hours in your booking calendar.

If you don’t see this setting, visit the Advanced Scheduling Options guide to show you how to turn this setting on. And for more details on the Advance setting.

This limits when customers can access your calendar to book any time slot. This is useful when you’d like to set a period to open and close access to your booking calendar.

If you don’t see this setting, visit the Advanced Scheduling Options guide to show you how to turn this setting on. And for more details on the Booking Window.

Choose the maximum amount of bookings you’d like to receive in a single day.

For example, if you set this to two, once you’ve received 2 bookings for a specific day, then the entire day is blocked off from receiving any more bookings.

The appointment type can only have a single fixed price for each booking. Here you can enter your price and preferred currency type.

We also don’t automatically carry out refunds, so you’ll have to manually enforce them here with the Refund Policy field.

Here are some helpful guides to get you started on the Payments feature:

• Setup Payments
• Refunds for Paid Appointments

Required

With the Required setting, a customer must complete a payment method in order to make a booking.

Optional

With the Optional setting, a customer has the choice to either complete the payment before booking or not. The customer does not need to pay to book an appointment; they can use the “Pay Later” option.

Under the Sync Appointments with this calendar heading, you’ll see a list of radio buttons. Whenever a new appointment is booked, SSA will create a new Google Event on the calendar that you choose here.

In addition, notice that the radio buttons mean you can only choose a single calendar to sync.

Under the Check these calendars for conflicts heading, you’ll see a list of checkboxes. SSA checks each of the selected Google Calendars here and removes booking availability if it finds any conflicts.

Additionally, notice that the checkboxes mean you can choose multiple calendars to check for conflicts.

With the Custom Meeting URL option, you can enter a static/fixed meeting link. For example, Zoom provides a personal meeting room link for each account; this would be an excellent place to add it.

Whatever you enter here will be used in the Google Events that SSA creates when you’re using Google Sync.

Additionally, this can also be added automatically to notifications when you use the Twig template code.

Available in the Plus, Pro, and Business Editions.

With the Google Meet option, you can generate a unique meeting link for each appointment booked.

Similar to the Custom Meeting URL, this link is also attached to the Google Events that SSA creates. And you can also attach it to the SSA notifications.

Visit this guide for more information on Google Meet.

Available in the Plus, Pro, and Business Editions.

With the Zoom option, you can generate a unique meeting link for each appointment booked. Zoom also gives you the option of making your meeting room into a:

1. Private Meeting: Host required to admin each meeting attendee
2. Or, an Open Meeting: Anyone with the link can immediately join

Similar to the Custom Meeting URL, this link is also attached to the Google Events that SSA creates. And you can also attach it to the SSA notifications.

Visit this guide for more information on Zoom.

Available in the Plus, Pro, and Business Editions.

With the Webex option, you can generate a unique meeting link for each appointment booked. Webex also gives you the option of making your meeting room into a:

1. Private Meeting: Host required to admin each meeting attendee
2. Or, an Open Meeting: Anyone with the link can immediately join

Similar to the Custom Meeting URL, this link is also attached to the Google Events that SSA creates. And you can also attach it to the SSA notifications.

Visit this guide for more information on Webex.

Available in the Business Editions only.

With the Team Member’s Web Meeting URL option, you can make sure the customer receives the correct Team Member web meeting URL with this option.

Similar to the Custom Meeting URL, this link is also attached to the Google Events that SSA creates. And you can also attach it to the SSA notifications.

Google Meet and Zoom are currently incompatible with the Team Booking feature. If you decide to use these third-party services along with Team booking, only one virtual meeting can be conducted at a time.

Visit this guide for more information on the Team member’s Web Meeting URL.

Available in the Plus, Pro, and Business Editions.

Add a custom text, checkbox, or radio field to the booking form. Learn more about how to add and edit custom fields in our Custom Fields guide.

The Expanded Booking Flow shows the Date Selection screen followed by the Time selection screen before getting to the final customer information screen in the booking form.

The Express Booking Flow consists of a single Appointment Options View containing the Date and Time selection on the same screen.

The First Available Booking Flow sequence begins by prompting the user to choose the First Available time slot within your pre-selected duration.

This Flow is also unique because it requires selecting a Fallback Flow. These are the booking steps that you’d like users to see if there is no time slot within the pre-selected duration for the First Available Flow.