Introduction

Sometimes settings cause missing time slots in your Booking Calendar. You’ll need this guide to help you double-check settings to ensure you’re showing the correct availability in your booking calendars. This will help you with how to fix the “there are no available appointments” error.

What You May Be Seeing

• “There are no available appointments”
• “This appointment type cannot be booked at this time” – Skip to the Booking Window section!
• Missing time slots in your availability

Availability Detective

Before manually reviewing each setting below, give our Availability Detective tool a try. This will automatically detect many of the issues we list below.

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Quick Fix Checklist for No Available Appointments or Missing Time Slots

• Set Up Availability: Select time slots to display on the booking calendar.
• Duration: Duration of an Appointment Type can block off timeslots.
• Availability Window: No time slots will appear outside that date range, even if there could be some overlap.
• Appointment Buffer: Clients won’t see timeslots that fall within the buffer time.
• Notice Required: Clients visiting your Booking Calendar will not be able to see time slots that fall within the Notice Required range.
• Advance: Clients cannot book beyond the Advance range.
• Booking Window: Time slots won’t show up when a client visits your Booking Calendar on a day outside the Booking Window range.
• Per Day Limit: Days that meet this limit won’t show any more time slots for that specific day.
• Google Calendar: Google Calendar events block off time slots in your Booking Calendar.
• Capacity: Time slots that meet this max booking limit don’t show up to your clients.
• Independent Availability: By default, booked time slots in one Appointment Type block off the same times on other Appointment Types.
• Team Booking: Time slots will not show as available when team members are unavailable.
• Resources: Time slots will not show as available when resources are unavailable for booking.
• Pending Appointments: When appointments are in pending_payment or pending_form status, the time slot is held until a set amount of time has passed.
• Availability Cache: SSA keeps a memory of the available time slots and days, and sometimes resetting the cache may fix missing timeslots.

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Set Up Availability

You have to choose timeslots to show Availability on the booking calendar. If you have not selected any timeslot within the Availability table in the Appointment Type Settings, then no appointment times will be available for display on the booking calendar.

Are the timeslots missing because they’re not selected in the availability table?

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Duration

Depending on how you’ve defined your availability under the Availability tab, an appointment’s duration set under the Basics tab, can impact the availability of timeslots.

For example, if you’ve set the duration for 90 minutes and the timeslots are spaced with a half-hour difference, if a timeslot is reserved, the following timeslots that lie within the duration time will disappear automatically.

If the booked timeslot is still available for booking, that means the Capacity is set to Group and more than 1.

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Availability Window

The Availability Window setting, under the Availability tab, is the date range in which time slots can be shown on your Booking Calendar.

No time slots will appear outside that date range, even if there could be some overlap. Do the missing time slots fall outside of the Availability Window range?

For example: Let’s assume you’ve set up the range between 2 PM May 20th and 2 PM May 21st. All the available time slots will show up within that time period. Anything outside of that is unavailable, even if there’s an overlap.

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Appointment Buffer

The Appointment Buffer, under the Scheduling Options tab, allows you to set up free time before and after an appointment.

Setting this up means the plugin will automatically block any timeslots during the buffer time when an appointment is booked. As a note, if you have set up both before and after buffer times, the system takes into account only the greater buffer time, not the sum of both.

Do the missing time slots fall within the Appointment Buffer time of any of your scheduled appointments?

For example, if you have set the before as 30 minutes and after as 1 hour in the Appointment Buffer settings, all appointments up to 1 hour after the end time of the booked appointment will be automatically removed.

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Notice Required

The Notice Required, under the Scheduling Options tab, helps you avoid last-minute appointments. Setting this will give you some time to prepare for new appointments.

The Notice Required range limits clients to see time slots that fall within the range. Even if there could be some overlap. Do the missing time slots fall within the Notice Required range?

For example: If you’ve set a Notice Required range for 3 days, the calendar won’t show time slots for the next 3 days (72 hours). Time slots falling in between the cut-off time don’t show either.

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Advance

The Advance setting, under the Scheduling Options tab, helps you limit how far into the future a client can book an appointment.

The Advance range limits clients from booking time slots beyond the specified range. Do the missing appointments fall outside the Advance range?

For example: If you’ve set Advance to 3 days, the only time slots appearing on the calendar are the ones that fall within the next 3 days (or 72 hours). Anything beyond that will be unavailable.

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Booking Window

The Booking Window, under the Scheduling Options tab, is the date range of when clients can see the time slots. The time slots won’t show up when a client visits your Booking Calendar on a day outside the Booking Window range. Are you looking at the Booking Calendar outside of the Booking Window range?

If you’re missing time slots because of the Booking Window, you’re likely seeing this message, “This appointment type cannot be booked at this time”.

For example: Let’s pretend you’ve set up the range between May 1^st and May 2nd. If it’s March 30th, you won’t see any time slots until May 1st.

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Per Day Limit

The Per Day Limit setting, under the Scheduling Options tab, helps you limit the bookings you can accept each day.

Days that have met the limit won’t show any more time slots for that specific day. Have you met the Per Day Limit for that day?

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Independent Availability

By default, all the Appointment Types depend on each other; this is to avoid double-booking between your Appointment Types. If you’re expecting the Appointment Types to work independently, you may see missing time slots. Do you need your Appointment Types to work Independently from each other?

If there’s a new booking from 10 AM to 11 AM in one appointment type, it blocks off all the time slots for that hour-long duration in other Appointment Types too.

Here is a guide with more information on switching to Independent Appointment Types.

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Capacity

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Google Calendar

When Google Calendar syncs with SSA to check for conflicts, your personal Google Calendar Events can block off your Booking Calendar time slots. 

Are there any personal events marked as the following during the missing time slots?

• Busy
• Out of Office
• Focus Time (when set to automatically decline meetings)

Google Tasks and Reminders will not affect your time slots in Simply Schedule Appointments. Only events marked as “Busy”, “Out of Office”, and “Focus Time” will be taken into account.

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Team Booking

When team members are assigned to appointment types, the booking calendar will then take the team members’ availability into account. Team member availability can be impacted by several things:

• The team member’s custom working hours.
• Or, how many team members are available.

Do the team members have their own custom working hours set? Are all team members already booked?

Learn more on managing team members.

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Resources

When resources are assigned to appointment types, the booking calendar will then take the number of resources available into account. Resource availability can be impacted by several things:

• The number of resources assigned to the appointment type.
• Or, no resource items were added to the resource group.

Are the resources already booked? Were any resources created and assigned to the appointment type?

Learn more on managing resources.

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Pending Payments or Form Submission

At first glance, it may be a little confusing as to why a time slot isn’t showing as available when there’s nothing booked for that time. But, sometimes an appointment in a pending status can cause a time slot to show as unavailable.

The pending_payments status is a result of Simply Schedule Appointments waiting for the payment to clear before confirming the booking. Is the Payments feature being utilized in your booking calendar?

The pending_form status is a result of utilizing one of the form integrations to book an appointment. As soon as a time is selected by someone, even if the form has not been submitted yet, the time slot is held for 60 minutes. Are you using a form integration such as Gravity Forms or Formidable Forms?

We would recommend using the Filter on your Appointments page to check if there is an appointment in the pending_payments or pending_form status that is blocking off that time slot.

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Troubleshoot the Availability Cache

By default, SSA keeps a memory of the available time slots and days so that the booking calendar doesn’t have to repeatedly load it each time.

However, sometimes the time slots can appear unavailable, and resetting the cache may be all it needs to reappear again. Has the availability cache been reset?

We have a guide that goes over how to troubleshoot the Availability Cache.

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Related Guides

• 

  Appointment Type Settings

• 

  Advanced Scheduling Options

• 

  Blackout Dates

• 

  Google Calendar FAQ

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