Setting up your working times

Navigating the calendar to allow you to set your availability

Iain avatar
Written by Iain
Updated over a week ago

Our Calendar function combines your regular working times, your appointments, reserved slots for clients, offers of rearrangements for clients and any unavailable times you have added. 

When you first create your Profile, your Calendar will be empty. This is the Calendar view you will see :

An empty Calendar like this means you will not be shown in our listing as you have no working times set.

We also have a useful article here which explains the different elements and colour coding used in the Calendar which we'd recommend taking a look at.



Timezones

Please note that your working times will be anchored to the timezone your device appears to be located in. The timezone is shown at the bottom of the Calendar page : 

What this means is that as summer time/daylight savings is applied in that timezone, the hours you work will remain the same. For example, in the UK you will have the same working hours whether the clocks go forward or backwards. Clients accessing the Platform will also see session times appear in their local timezone (times noted in emails will always be GMT/GMT+1).


Adding Working Times

Working times are time ranges during the week that you wish to make available for booking by clients.

Working times repeat weekly, so you should only add times that you currently have available to book on an ongoing basis.

This is because most clients booking via the Platform are choosing a slot that works for their schedule on an ongoing basis, and are looking to book weekly sessions. For clients who need flexibility, you still book follow-up sessions for any date/time if a client is not able to meet at the same time on a weekly basis if this is something you are able to offer. 

To add a new working time, click on Add working time from the pop-up menu that appears when you click on the small calendar icon in the right-hand corner of the Calendar, or by clicking on an empty light grey space in the Calendar to select a specific day of the week :

You will then be asked to configure the working time in the pop-up that appears :

First, choose which locations you will offer during this working time - you must select at least one.

Please note that you can't have overlapping working times, so if you want to offer Video and in-person sessions for example, select both of these as shown in the example above.

Then, set when your availability begins and ends.

For example, if you want to make yourself available all morning from 9am to 12pm on Mondays, then set the times as shown above. This will mean you have availability from 09:00 to 12:00 on a Monday, with sessions available at 9am, 10am, and 11am. 


Session Start Times

The final part of setting up a working time period is to set the Session Start Times. 

The default setting is to have sessions start on the hour, however, the last part of the working time editing screen allows you to set different or additional start times.

For example, in the previous screenshot, we've accepted the default settings for our working time between 09:00 and 12:00 on a Monday, which will result in having sessions advertised for clients to book at 9am, 10am, and 11am. 

If you'd like sessions to start at a different time, e.g. 30 minutes past the hour as shown below, then for the same working time of 09:00 and 12:00, you'd have sessions available for booking at 9.30am and 10.30am as sessions are only offered when a full hour is available : 

To give clients maximum flexibility (potentially at the expense of filling your diary inefficiently) you can offer more than one start time by clicking the Add another start time option.

For example, if you added both 0 and 30 minutes past the hour you'd add these to the screen as shown below :

This would result in sessions being advertised in your Profile at 9am, 9.30am, 10am, 10.30am and 11am.

If you have those times set up, and a client books the 9.30am slot, however, then only the 10.30am and 11am slots would remain bookable by other clients.

Start times can be any number of minutes past the hour. For example, setting them to 5 would offer sessions at: 09:05 and 10:05 for the working time above. 

Please note that it is best to ensure that the session times you are offering match the start and end times of your working time slot to ensure you don't have time that will never be offered to clients. 


Quick Tip!

You can also add your availability in individual 1-hour slots, instead of periods of time that last several hours or all day.

This can take longer to initially set up, but it can make it a lot more convenient to manage your availability while working on the Platform long term, as you can quickly and easily delete and re-add ongoing slots, instead of needing to edit working times or add unavailable times to multiple weeks (see section below). 

In the example below, we are adding availability for a single 1-hour slot, for a session at 10am on Mondays :

Repeating this process for each individual slot that we currently have available for new clients to book will then result in something similar to the availability shown in the screenshot below where slots are spread out throughout the week :

This means that if a slot becomes unavailable on an ongoing basis (eg. the slot is reserved for a non-Harley client or you have another repeating commitment pop up), all you need to do is click on the working time and then click on the bin icon in the pop-up to quickly delete the slot from your ongoing availability. You can add slots back whenever they become available to book again.


Session Lengths

The sessions offered to new clients in your Profile are always 50 minutes long, but booked into 1-hour slots. This means that a full hour will be blocked out in your Calendar to allow for at least a 10-minute gap between clients.

You can create follow-up sessions that are different lengths by utilising the modified fee feature to set the correct fee before booking a longer (or shorter) session, but only therapists can create sessions which are longer than a standard 50-minute session.

The client's confirmation emails will always state that the session is 10 minutes shorter than the time booked in your Calendar to account for the gap between clients.


Adding Unavailable Times

Unavailable times are one-off times that you would normally be available but are not due to holidays, sick leave, other appointments etc.

We have a full article about marking times as unavailable here

There are two options for adding unavailable times to your Calendar. The simplest option is connecting your Google Calendar so appointments you have marked as busy in your Google Calendar can sync across and be marked as unavailable on Harley Therapy : 

The calendar integration we use doesn't read the details of any appointment in your Google Calendar. The only information we receive is the dates and times for periods marked as busy in the Google calendar. We have more detailed information in this article.

Please note that 'all-day' events will not sync across from the Google Calendar, as the only times that sync across will be those explicitly marked as 'busy'.

You can also sync other calendar types such as Outlook to a Google Calendar if you do not usually use a Google Calendar for this purpose.


Alternatively, to add an unavailable time directly to the Calendar, click on Add unavailable time from the pop-up menu that appears by clicking on the small calendar icon in the right-hand corner of the Calendar space, or by clicking on an empty light grey space in the Calendar to pre-select that specific date :

Then enter the start and end date and time for when you will be unavailable (this can be any length of time, from 1 hour to several weeks) :

Please note, if you will be unavailable for several months, we would recommend deleting all of your working times (or pausing your Profile), as otherwise, it is very easy to forget when you will be showing as unavailable again, which can lead to unexpected bookings being received when the unavailable time comes to an end.

Multiple cancellations or rearrangements due to a therapist being unavailable (or unconfirmed bookings) will affect the therapist's position in the search results, leading to fewer bookings being received, and can lead to the therapist's Profile being permanently closed to new bookings. 

We have more information about updating your unavailable times here.

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