Setting your availability

As you setup your booking page on YouCanBook.me you'll want to consider how do you want YouCanBook.me to display your availability for booking:

Repeating Availability

Use repeating availability on your booking page if: 

• your schedule is standard from week to week
• you manage your day-to-day schedule directly on your calendar
• you want to be booked anytime during your set working hours, as long as you're not already busy

Under Times & availability > Availability, set your general working hours for each day of the week.  YouCanBook.me will display available booking times between these set hours where there are no conflicts on your linked calendar. If you add a busy event to your linked calendar, that time will become unavailable for booking on YouCanBook.me.

Tip: Add an all-day event and set it to busy to block a full day from being booked.

Custom Availability

Use Custom Availability on your booking page if:

• If your availability for bookings changes from week to week
• You only want to offer certain times for booking
• You want to add or remove booking times without logging into YouCanBook.me

With Custom Availability you will create blocks of time on your linked calendar when you want to be available for bookings, and only that time will display for booking to your clients. 

 Set your working hours

The first step is to set boundaries on when YouCanBook.me should look for availability on your calendar. This is done by setting your working hours. Set the widest range of availability that you may want to offer for booking. Select every day if you may want to offer a slot that day, even if it's just once a month. Remember, YouCanBook.me will only display booking times within these set hours.

Tip: If you are creating a booking page for your distributed team across multiple time zones, make sure the set working hours is wide enough to cover all team members' available times. We recommend setting your availability as 12:00am to 12:00am to cover all timezones

 Choose a title for your events

The second step is to select a key phrase that you will use on your linked calendar to tell YouCanBook.me you want to display that day and time for booking. Where we find this key phrase on your calendar, we will display the time for booking. 

The phrase is case sensitive. Once you set a phrase, your booking page will say "No Availability" because we haven't added any blocks to your linked calendar. That will be completed in step three. 

Tip: If you have multiple booking pages, each booking page can carry its own key phrase, helping you further customize the times you offer for booking. 

 Create events in your connected calendar

In a second browser window, open the calendar YouCanBook.me is checking for availability. You will now start creating availability by adding events to your calendar when you want to be available for bookings.

For YouCanBook.me to show availability on your booking page, you need to add events to your calendar that meet the following criteria:

1. The title of the event matches your key phrase set in YouCanBook.me exactly. To reduce a chance for error, click the Copy link above the field where you've set your key phrase.
2. The event must be set to "Free" - Events that are set to "busy" will not be seen by YouCanBook.me. 
3. The start time of the event must align with your selected grid display.
4. There cannot be any other busy events on your calendar at the same time as your availability block. 

Tip: Make events repeating or recurring if you want to be available at the same time each week. 

Continue adding events to your calendar to populate your availability. Add as many or as few blocks as you want in a day, week or month. 

When you've set up your availability on your linked calendar, you can come back to YouCanBook.me and refresh your browser window to see the availability populate.

Managing Custom availability

• Taking a vacation? Delete the availability block from your linked calendar, and that time will no longer be available for booking
• Want multiple breaks in a day? Add several Custom Availability blocks to your calendar, with a desired break in between
• Need to add availability for a certain day?  Create a new availability block on your linked calendar, following Step 3 again. 
• New bookings will appear on top of your Custom Availability block. You can delete the Custom Availability block from your calendar once you've received a booking, but if that booking cancels, the time will not re-open for booking until that block is added back to your linked calendar. 
• Any busy events you add during the length of your Custom Availability block will act as a conflict and prevent you from being booked. 
• Need help troubleshooting? Start here.