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 in your 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. 

Follow this 3 step setup guide to activate Custom Availability. 

Step 1: Set your working hours

Under Times & Availability > Availability, select Custom Availability. Then set your working hours for each day. These hours should be the widest range of hours you may possibly want to offer bookings from week to week. If you only offer bookings one Saturday a month, make sure Saturdays are checked. 

Tip: If you are creating a booking page for your distributed team across multiple time zones, make sure the time range is wide enough to cover all team members available times.

Step 2: Set a key phrase for your availability

This will be a key phrase you will use to identify when you're available for bookings directly on your linked calendar. It is case sensitive. 

Step 3: Create events in your connected calendar

Whether you're using Google calendar or Outlook, the final step is to open that linked calendar in another browser window and create events titled with your key phrase during your working hours you've designated in Step 1.

Tips: These events need to be:

• At least the length of your booking duration set under Times & availability > Duration & Display. If they are longer, the time slots will be broken up into multiple booking slots.
• Follow the pattern of your grid display selected under Times & Availability > Duration & Display. For example a grid display of 30 minutes will allow events to start at the top and bottom of the hour. 
• Set to free as you create them on your calendar to be read by the system as open for booking.
• Can be created as repeating events on your linked calendar if you're available the same day/time every week.

Continue adding Custom Availability events to your calendar to populate your availability. These slots can change from week to week as long as they fall within the working hours you've set in your YouCanBook.me settings. 

When you've setup your availability on your linked calendar, you can come back to YouCanBook.me and click Refresh the preview to see the availability you've created in your calendar populate.

Have another meeting and need to remove a booking time? Delete the Custom Availability event from your calendar. YouCanBook.me will keep up with the changes and remove that slot from your booking page. 

Have some free time that you want to add in some booking availability? Just access your linked calendar and create a new Custom Availability event. YouCanBook.me is always scanning your calendar for changes to Custom Availability events, and will add that new slot for booking to your booking page.