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Connecting my Google Calendar

Using your Google Calendar to manage your unavailable times

Iain avatar
Written by Iain
Updated over 5 months ago

Keeping your calendar up to date is extremely important to ensure that clients are only able to book sessions that are currently available.

You can manage your availability through your dashboard, but if you usually manage your availability using Google Calendar, you can connect this to your Harley Therapy profile to automatically block out any times you mark as 'busy'.

Please note that this is a one-way connection, so your Harley Therapy appointments will not sync across to your Google Calendar. You can click on the calendar attachments included in booking notifications to quickly add these to your Google Calendar however. 


Connecting your Google Calendar

To authorise Harley Therapy to connect to your Google account, first go to the Integrations section of Your Account, and select the option to Connect your Google Calendar :

You will be asked to authorise read-only access to your calendars by Harley Therapy. Once you have authorised them you'll be returned to your account and can select which calendar you want to sync with your Harley Therapy calendar. 

Once you've chosen the calendar you want to sync, click on the purple Connect button to establish the connection :


Once connected, you'll see you have the ability to Disconnect the calendar or to Sync Now! :

The calendar will synchronise at least every 24 hours, but should update automatically after you make any changes to the busy times in your Google Calendar.


Viewing your unavailable slots

Once your calendar is connected then any appointment that is marked as Busy in your Google calendar will sync across to your Harley Therapy Calendar and be blocked out as Unavailable. 

For example, if you have the session marked as Busy in your Google calendar as shown below, this will appear in grey in your Harley Therapy Calendar as this will be blocked out/marked as unavailable : 


Why has my Google Calendar appointment not marked a slot as unavailable?

If you've added a new appointment to your Google Calendar but overlapping sessions are still shown as available on Harley Therapy there are a number of things to check :

  1. Check that the appointment on the Google Calendar is definitely set to Busy - please note that 'All Day' appointments will not sync across to be marked as unavailable in your Harley Therapy Calendar unless they are marked as Busy.

  2. Check whether you see the slot as unavailable on the specific day in your Harley Therapy dashboard - if not, go to the Account -> Integrations page and click on Sync Now. We would recommend adding another Busy time to your Google Calendar to see if this prompts the Calendars to sync.

  3. If both of the above are correct it may be that the update may take a few minutes to propagate through our systems. If it still is incorrect after waiting a few minutes, please contact us so we can take a look.


What information will be shared with Harley Therapy? 

To perform the sync process we only ask Google for a list of busy slots in your calendar. This returns information about the start and end dates/times of the busy periods only

An example of the data we receive for an appointment marked as busy in your diary is shown below :

       {
          "start": "2018-12-03T10:00:00Z",
          "end": "2018-12-03T10:15:00Z"
        }

As a result of this, no details of the appointments will be requested or stored other than the start and end times, ensuring that any client data or private information in your Google Calendar is kept secure and confidential.


I am going on holiday - can I use my Google calendar to ensure my holiday is marked as unavailable on Harley Therapy?

You can use an appointment in your Google Calendar to mark yourself as unavailable for a holiday, bank holiday, doctor's appt, or any other out-of-office situation (e.g. Jury Service) in your Google Calendar.

If you do this you need to make sure that either :

  • the appointment start and end time reflect your holiday start and end date/time; or

  • if you've used an all-day session, that the repeat and end settings ensure the appointment stops repeating when you come back, and is marked as Busy, e.g. 

In both cases ensure that the appointment will need to be set to Busy. Normally Google will set multi-day appointments to 'Free' by default so please double-check this.

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