How far in advance can clients book a session?

Understanding what notice you'll get for a booking and how to manage this via your preferences

Iain avatar
Written by Iain
Updated over a week ago

All working times that you have entered in your calendar where you don't have another client booking or an unavailable time set (either manually or via synchronisation with your google calendar) are available for clients to book.

It's vitally important to keep your working times up to date so that clients are not disappointed by having to reschedule or cancel their initial session. It takes a great deal for many clients to make that first step. We really appreciate your support in not disappointing clients at the point of reaching out for therapy. 

Minimum notice period for bookings

By default, clients can only book sessions at least 24 hours ahead of time. This notice period cannot be increased beyond 24 hours and it's a key part of our service to be able to offer quick and simple access to therapy sessions. The majority of our clients book between 24 and 48 hours in advance.

Some clients want to be able to book even sooner. If you wish to offer clients the ability to book sessions with less than 24 hours notice, you can add one of two settings in the Preferences tab of your Profile

These additional settings are shown below:

The second setting allows you to accept bookings up to a specified time the day before for any of your available slots the following day.

For example, if you choose to accept bookings the next day if booked before 21:00, this means that if you had available slots from 08:00 in the morning on a Tuesday then clients would be able to book any of these up until 21:00 on the Monday evening. 

After 21:00 the advance notice would revert to 24 hours so if you had an available slot at 22:00 the following day then this would be bookable from 21:00 onwards the previous day.

The third setting allows you to simply specify a shorter notice period of between 2 and 23 hours. 

This allows you to accept same day bookings but if you had this set to 2 hours it would also allow (if you had an available session at 08:00) for this to be booked up to 06:00 the same day. 

Note that you should only select a short notice period if you know you will be able to respond to confirm the session in all circumstances - noting clients could book during the night for a session early in the morning.

Maximum notice period

The maximum notice period allows you a number of options with respect to what the maximum in advance a client may book sessions with you.

Many therapists don't want to allow booking of available times far in advance so the following options are available in the Preferences tab of your Profile:

The options are:

  • no limit which means that clients may book as far in the future as they wish based on your recurring working time availability

  • one week which means that clients will only be shown your availability for the next 7 days

  • two weeks which means that clients will only be shown your availability for the next 14 days

  • one month which means that clients will only be shown your availability for the month - i.e. up to the same day in the following month

The default is no limit so this will allow clients the most flexibility in booking for clients but may not suit all therapists.

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