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One-Off Event Setup

This guide applies to:

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

Introduction

SSA works best for recurring weekly availabilities, but if you need to offer a single Event, we recommend you use our integrations with The Events Calendar.

We’re going to set up a simple Appointment Type that we’ll be able to reuse for many events. We’ll let The Events Calendar take care of the Availability Window and display the one-off events.

Some Appointment Type Settings, we’ll need to pay attention to:

  • Availability Table
  • Locked Timezone
  • Notice Required
  • (Optional) Capacity

Learn more about The Events Calendar integration.

SSA + Event Booking in Action

Using The Events Calendar (TEC) integration, you’ll be able to list your events in beautiful dedicated pages to which you can attach images and descriptions.

The Free Edition of TEC creates an /events page where all your events are listed, and the Pro Edition lets you embed an events module into any page and section.

In the video below, you’ll see what that looks like embedded into a yoga site’s homepage.

Screenshot depicting the set up overview of The Events Calendar + SSA.

Setting Up the SSA Appointment Type

We want to set up a general Appointment Type that we can continue to reuse for our events. This means it should have an open Availability and rules.

Availability Table

Since we’ll be using The Events Calendar to work as our Availability Window, we don’t have to be specific about the hours we set for the availability table.

This will allow us to offer a general Appointment Type, like Yoga Class. And instead, let The Events Calendar get specific with dates, times, and Event descriptions.

For example, I can highlight the entire business hours availability for my Availability Table:

Screenshot depicting the Availability table to be selected during creation of the appointment type.
Open Availability in my Table

Locked Timezone

By default, the Appointment Type timezone is set to Localized, making it so that the calendar user sees the time slots in their timezone.

If The Events Calendar timezone doesn’t match the user’s timezone, it might not be very clear.

Switch over to the Locked Timezone and read more about the Appointment Timezone settings.

Locked vs Localized timezones in the

Notice Required

By default, we set this to 1-day, meaning that you require 24 hours’ notice for someone to book an appointment. So when you’re viewing the booking calendar, no one can book between now and the next 24 hours.

Please adjust this to fit your scheduling needs! See this guide for more information on the Notice Required setting.

(Optional) Capacity

If you’re planning a class or meeting where you’d like multiple people to sign up for your event, you’ll need to use the Capacity feature.

You’ll want to open the Capacity tab in your Appointment Type and set it to Group along with the maximum amount of people you’d like to sign up. Find more information on how Capacity works in this guide.

Screenshot depicting the capacity settings that can be set.
Setting my max Group Capacity to 15

The Events Calendar Set Up

Learn more about The Events Calendar integration.

Finally, in this step, we will add a Start and End date to our New Event in The Events Calendar plugin. This is to make sure that this single event is the only one shown to our customers..

In this step, getting as close as possible to your event time frame when choosing the start and end dates is essential.

For example, if I want to show a single 90-minute class using my general Yoga Class appointment type. Then, I would set my Start and End Times here to be precisely 90 minutes long.

Screenshot depicting an event created in Events Calendar with the time and date.

Note that The Events Calendar doesn’t handle 15 or 20-minute intervals.

Infographic depicting how to limit a one-off booking event.

Adding the Shortcode

As a note, if you haven’t already embedded our dedicated TEC shortcode to the page, please use the following shortcode:

[tec_ssa_booking type="appointment-type-slug-here"]

You’ll need to replace the appointment-type-slug-here with the Slug from your appointment type.

Slug field in the Appointment Type Settings

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