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Flexible booking start times

How to enable and use flexible booking times for staff members

Jakob Larsson Stern avatar
Written by Jakob Larsson Stern
Updated yesterday

At Waitwhile, we understand that every business has unique scheduling needs. That's why we've made our booking system highly customizable, including the ability for staff members to override availability, set manual booking durations, and also set flexible start times for staff bookings.

What are flexible booking start times?

This feature allows your staff to schedule appointments at 5-minute intervals, ignoring current slot sizes and providing more precision and flexibility than standard time slots. While guests will still book according to your regular slot duration, staff members can fine-tune appointment times to better accommodate specific situations.

This configuration comes with a number of benefits, including:

  • Greater scheduling flexibility for staff members

  • Ability to optimize appointment scheduling

  • Maintain standard booking rules for guests while giving staff additional control

How to enable and use flexible start times

To start using flexible booking start times:

  1. Under Options, check the box for Enable flexible booking start times (The feature is disabled by default)

  2. Click Save

  3. Navigate to the Visits page or the Calendar and create a new booking

  4. In the Start time dropdown, toggle the Flexible start times

  5. Now, you can select any start time (within five-minute increments), while the duration will remain the same

Please note that you will need to enable this option in the dropdown for each new booking that you're adding.

Note: Leveraging flexible start times will allow staff to create bookings that partly occupy multiple slots, which can lower overall location booking availability.

For example: A location has slots at 10:00-11:00 and 11:00-12:00. If a staff member creates a booking at 10:30-11:30, it will occupy both slots.

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