Double Booking and Overlapping Appointments A Andrew Kelly

Acuity will prevent double booking by default, but you can opt to open up more than one appointment at a time for clients to book. Or you can choose to allow appointments to partly overlap.

Double Booking

With any paid plan, you can allow multiple appointments in the same time slot. That means that two (or more) clients can book appointments for the same time.

The location of this setting will vary depending on how your account is configured.

If you have one calendar and don’t have availability by appointment type set up:

• Go to Business Settings > Availability > Calendars. 
• Click on the Client Scheduling Limits button.

If you have two or more calendars and don’t have availability by appointment type set up, you can control double booking independently for each calendar. In this case:

• Go to Business Settings > Availability > Calendars, find the calendar you're interested in, and click the Edit Availability/Limits button.

• Click on the Client Scheduling Limits button.

If you have availability by appointment type set up, you can control double booking independently for each appointment group within a calendar. In this case:

• Go to Business Settings > Availability > Calendars, find the group of appointments for which you want to allow double-booking, and click the Edit Availability/Limits button.

• Click on the Client Scheduling Limits button.

Note: When availability by appointment type is enabled and double booking is allowed, once one appointment is booked into a time slot, only other appointments from the same group can be double booked on top of it.

Partially Overlapping Appointments

You can also allow appointments to partially overlap using Acuity’s padding feature. You can accomplish this by adding a negative number of minutes of padding to the beginning or end of an appointment type.

For example, negative 20 minutes of padding after an appointment type will allow clients to schedule an appointment that begins 20 minutes before the prior appointment ends. So, if the first appointment runs from 9am to 10am, the second appointment could begin at 9:40am.

You can find this setting by going to Business Settings > Appointment Types and clicking the Edit button next to the appointment type that you want other appointments to be able to overlap. Click the link beneath the duration field that reads Block off extra time before or after....

Did this answer your question?