Online Booking Hack: Restrict Online Booking for Certain Times/Services

Want to try online booking, but feel your schedule or services are too complicated? Here is a quick booking hack to help you out.

Resources: the perfect booking hack

To let clients see a service but limit their access to booking it online, a resource can be added to the service. Yes, the resource feature is meant to add objects like massage tables to a service and prevent multiple people from booking a limited resource at the same time. 

However, because the resource has its own schedule, it can also enforce other restrictions on a service. There are plenty of creative uses for resources, but here are our favorite alternative uses to help you control your schedule.

When to use:

1. When the service is limited to specific times but the staff members who provide the service work other times as well (e.g. a staff member works M-F, but only provides a specific service on Mondays).
2. When some services require the client to call in, but other services do not (e.g. a staff member can take online bookings for haircuts, but wants a client to call in for more intensive processes like color correction to determine the amount of time needed). Using a resource makes the service visible on your menu, but unavailable for booking.
3. Your business availability is based on the start of your last appointment, not the end. In other words, you want to start your last booking of the day at 5pm, not end it at that time. This means your actual end time depends on the length of the last service.

Instructions:

1. Go to Business > Resources
2. Click New in the upper right corner (phone) or Add New Resource (PC)
3. Name the resource something like "{ServiceName} Availability". Make sure to have "Don't Show this Resource" clicked. For C, we recommend naming the resources different service lengths, and link all services with that length.
4. Click on (Resource) Required for and select the services that you would like to apply this resource to.
5. Set the Hours to meet the needs of your business.

In example A above, the business would only make the resource available on Monday. For B, there would be no availability at all. For C, the last available time would be the latest start time + length of service (e.g. if you want the latest possible start to be 5pm and the service is 1 hour, the resource should only be available until 6pm).

Extra perk: Want to temporarily limit availability even more? (for example, you've run out of necessary supplies for a service or don't want to do it on a particular day). Notice you can add Time Off on a resource so you don't have to change the whole schedule just to limit a service for one day.

When NOT to use this booking hack:

When a service is only provided by certain staff members. In this case, you just apply the services to those staff members, and the availability of the service will be based on the staff members' schedules.

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