Setting Your Scheduling Limits A Andrew Kelly

What Scheduling Limits Are

Scheduling limits are settings that control when clients can book or edit appointments. Scheduling limits control:

• How far in advance clients can book appointments on your scheduling page.
• Whether or not clients have access to reschedule or cancel their own appointments.
• How far before a booked appointment clients can reschedule/cancel.
• How often appointments will be offered on your scheduling page.
• Whether or not clients are able to edit intake forms after scheduling.

There are two types of scheduling limits:

• Default scheduling limits affect your entire account.
• Scheduling limits for a specific calendar or for a group of appointments on a calendar only affect that calendar or group of appointments.

Some limits can be set in both the default scheduling limits and in the limits for specific calendars or groups of appointment types. In those cases, the limits on the specific calendar or appointment type group will override the default limits.

Default Scheduling Limits

What they control

General Scheduling Limits

• These settings allow you to control:
• Whether clients can reschedule their own appointments.
• Whether clients can cancel their own appointments.
• Whether clients can edit intake forms after submitting and, if so, whether there’s a cutoff for edits as the appointment approaches.

Appointment Start Times

You can set the interval at which appointments can start, or you can opt to have Acuity calculate it for you automatically.

If Acuity calculates this for you, it will find the lowest common denominator of your appointment durations (the largest number that can be divided into all of the appointment durations). So, if you have a 20-minute appointment type and a 10-minute appointment type, Acuity will offer slots starting every 10 minutes. If you have a 20-minute appointment type and a 15-minute appointment type, Acuity will will offer slots starting every 5 minutes.

Minimum and maximum lead time

These settings control when clients are able to book with you. They take the form of two sentences:

• DO NOT ALLOW CLIENTS TO SCHEDULE FEWER THAN [] hours in advance and more than [] days in the future.
• DO NOT ALLOW CLIENTS TO CANCEL OR RESCHEDULE APPOINTMENTS LESS THAN [] hours in advance.

Make Me Look Busy

This is a feature that can hide some open time slots from clients. Click here to learn more.

Minimize Gaps

This feature clusters your appointments together, to avoid holes in your work day. Click here to learn more.

How to edit default scheduling limits

• Go to Business Settings > Availability or Business Settings > Availability & Calendars.
• In the top section of the page, click on the link that says Edit Default Client Scheduling Limits.

• Make the changes you want.
• Click Save Limits.

Scheduling limits for specific calendars or groups of appointment types

What they control

These limits apply only to the specific calendar or appointment group where you find them. For that space, they override default scheduling limits.

Minimum and maximum lead time

These settings control when clients are able to book with you. They take the form of two sentences:

• DO NOT ALLOW CLIENTS TO SCHEDULE FEWER THAN [] hours in advance and more than [] days in the future.
• DO NOT ALLOW CLIENTS TO CANCEL OR RESCHEDULE APPOINTMENTS LESS THAN [] hours in advance.

Appointments per time slot

This controls double booking. The number of appointments that you enter here will be the number of appointments that Acuity will allow to happen at the same time for this calendar or group of appointments.

Maximum appointments

This controls how many appointments total can be booked for this calendar or appointment type group. The limit must be set separately for each calendar or group. You can limit appointments by number per day or week or by hours per day.

How to edit specific scheduling limits

• Go to Business Settings > Availability or Business Settings > Availability & Calendars.
• Find the calendar or appointment group you want and click EDIT AVAILABILITY/LIMITS.

• Click the Client Scheduling Limits tab near the top of the page.
• Make the changes you want.
• Click Save Limits.

Did this answer your question?