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Availability Detective to Find Missing Time Slots

This guide applies to:

  • Basic Edition
  • Plus Edition
  • Pro Edition
  • Business Edition

Introduction

The Availability Detective is a fast, easy tool that helps you determine why your appointments aren’t appearing on your website as planned. It also lets our support team fix issues faster by checking for the most common problems first.

You can also manually troubleshoot the settings yourself using our Availability Troubleshooting guide.

What Availability Detective looks for

The Availability Detective can tell you if one of your simple appointment settings is causing missing appointments.

It can detect whether one of the following settings is causing a conflict:

It also might be able to catch issues caused by:

How to find the Availability Detective

You can find the Availability Detective button in the Book an Appointment screen or the Appointment Types tab.

From the Appointments Page

Click on the + Book an Appointment button and find the Availability Detective (Beta) button.

Arrow pointing at trouble shoot availability on the +book an appointment page.

From the Appointment Types Page

While in Simply Schedule Appointments, go to Appointment Types and select an appointment you want to troubleshoot. Then, scroll down and look for the Availability button. At the bottom of that menu, click on the Troubleshoot Availability button.

When you click this, you will be asked to confirm that you want to leave without saving changes. Click Discard Changes to leave and go to the Availability Detective.

Arrow pointing at Availability Detective button under Availability tab in Appointment Type Settings.

How to use the Availability Detective

Choose an Appointment Type

Once you’re in the Availability Detective, you must tell it where to look for problems. To do this, choose the type of appointment to troubleshoot from the dropdown menu.

Select Appointment Type in Availability Detective from the dropdown options
Select Appointment Type in Availability Detective from the dropdown options

The next screen will show you the settings for that appointment type.

Arrow pointing at Appointment Type availability settings inside Availability Detective
Availability detective showing appointment type settings

Pick a Date and Time

Choose the date you want to troubleshoot, and then pick the time. The Availability Detective will let you know what settings prevent that appointment time slot from showing up.

Availability detective showing reason for non-availability
Availability detective showing reason for non-availability

The Availability Detective will say the time slot is available if everything looks good.

Or, if the detective can’t find the reason, it’ll let you contact us directly via the ASK OUR SUPPORT TEAM button.

External Calendar Events (Google Calendar troubleshooting)

If a time slot is unavailable because of Google Calendar, the Availability Detective can show you which Google Calendar events are blocking it.

For that, you need to click on External Calendar Events (Debug) on the top right.

External Calendar Events (Debug) option on the Availability Detective page

From here, you can:

  • Check on Google now – look up a single event directly from Google Calendar instead of relying on SSA’s cache.
  • Fix these events – If SSA finds its own past appointments being mistaken for external “busy” time (usually after a site URL or security change), this banner lets you reclaim them with one click. It’s a manual, one-time fix, and no emails are sent.
Fix these events button to fix drifted Google Calendar events

Still stuck?

File a support ticket with our five-star support team to get more help.

File a ticket

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