Availability & Scheduling

Clients can only book a provider when that provider has availability — the days, times, and locations they're open to see clients. Availability is the engine behind your calendar: it decides which slots appear on your booking pages and in the client app, and no one can be booked until it's set. On this page you'll set each provider's weekly working hours, tie those hours to the right location, and tune the booking rules — how far ahead clients can book, how much notice you need, and how long each slot runs — so the slots clients see match how your clinic actually runs.

There are three places you'll work: Staff → the provider → Schedule, where you set each person's weekly hours; your services (under Memberships & Services), where you set each service's slot length and cadence; and your memberships, whose join policy carries the booking window and notice rules. Clinic-wide defaults live in Settings → Scheduling.

How availability drives what clients can book

Before you set anything, it helps to know how the pieces fit together, because a slot only appears to a client when every rule below agrees:

• A provider's weekly hours define the outer window — the recurring days and times that person works, at a given location. No hours means no bookable slots, full stop.
• The service's slot rules — its length and start-time cadence — carve that window into individual bookable slots (for example, 30-minute slots starting on the hour).
• The booking window and minimum notice apply last. A member follows the rules on their plan; a client without a plan follows your organization's booking window, if you set one. In your client apps, a time outside the client's window shows as unavailable, and a booking outside it is refused.
• Buffers and existing appointments remove time that's already taken or reserved for prep.

What's left after all of that is exactly what a client sees as bookable. So if a provider "isn't showing any times," the cause is almost always missing hours, hours set at the wrong location, or a service with no slot length — all of which you set below.

Set a provider's weekly working hours

A provider's schedule is a weekly pattern of working blocks — days, times, and locations — that repeats until you change it. Open Staff, choose the provider, and select the Schedule section: you'll see their current week at a glance, when it took effect, and any change already scheduled for a future date.

1. Click Edit schedule. The week becomes an hour grid. Drag on empty space to draw a new block, or click an existing block to change it.

2. In the block editor, set the time, tick every day the block applies to, and pick the location it belongs to (leave "Any location" only if the provider genuinely works those hours everywhere — see the location tip below). You can also limit the block to specific services — a service limited to blocks is bookable only during them — or make it repeat every 2–4 weeks.

3. Click Save changes. The platform checks the schedule first (it will stop an impossible one, like being in two locations at once, and warn you about anything that would become unbookable) and then asks one question: when does this take effect? Pick today, a future date (the change takes over automatically on that morning), or fix a typo to correct the current schedule in place.

   If the new hours are only meant to last a while, tick Temporary — go back to the current schedule after and give the last day. The provider works the new pattern up to and including that date, and the schedule they had before comes back the next morning on its own.

4. The save dialog also lists any existing bookings that fall outside the new hours. They are never cancelled by a schedule change — review them on the calendar and reschedule if needed.

Change or remove hours

Editing works the same way as creating: open Edit schedule, click the block you want to change, and adjust its times, days, location or service limits. Saving asks the same "when does this take effect?" question, so a correction and a planned change are handled the same way.

To take hours away entirely — a provider stops working Fridays, or drops one of two locations — open the block and choose Remove block, then save. The day simply stops producing bookable slots from the effective date you pick. As with any schedule change, appointments already booked into those hours are not cancelled; the save dialog lists them so you can deal with each one deliberately.

If you scheduled a change for a future date and then change your mind, you don't have to edit it back. The Schedule header shows a Scheduled change banner with its start date; choose Cancel change on that banner and the schedule that was running simply carries on as though you'd never set it.

Plan a run of changes in advance

A provider whose hours move more than once — summer hours in June, term hours in September, back to normal in December — can have all of it entered now. Save each change with its own start date, and each one appears as its own Scheduled change banner listing the dates it covers. They take over in turn on their own mornings, with nobody logging in to trigger them.

The order you enter them in does not matter. Setting a change that starts before one you have already queued leaves the later one exactly where it is, and the platform simply ends the earlier schedule the day before the next one begins. Each banner carries its own Edit and Cancel change, so you can revise any of them right up until the morning it takes over — editing a queued change replaces it rather than adding a second change on the same date.

Saving a change that starts on a date you have already queued replaces that one. To have two different patterns in the same stretch of time, give them different start dates.

Make a provider unavailable for a period

Removing a block is permanent until you change it again. For an absence with an end date — a two-week holiday, a month away from one site, a service you're pausing over summer — use Reduced availability… on the Schedule header instead. It creates a dated exception: the named availability disappears for exactly that period and the normal schedule resumes by itself afterwards, with nothing to remember to undo.

The dialog asks for the period and then lets you scope it three ways:

• The whole schedule — leave both Unavailable at and For on their "All" setting. The provider isn't bookable at all between those dates.
• One location — choose it under Unavailable at. The provider keeps working their normal hours everywhere else. If their hours were set to "Any location", the platform expands them into explicit hours at every other site, so nothing else is lost.
• One service — choose it under For. The provider stays bookable for everything else at their usual times, and only that service stops being offered.

You can combine the last two — unavailable for Lab Reviews at Downtown only — by setting both.

A single day off is still time off

For one afternoon or a single day, use time off from the calendar as before. Reduced availability is for a dated pattern change; time off is for a one-off absence, and it stays visible to colleagues on the calendar.

Adding extra hours for a period uses the main editor

The Reduced availability shortcut only ever removes availability. To add hours temporarily — extra Saturday clinics through December, say — draw them in Edit schedule, then tick Temporary in the save dialog and give the last day. The extra hours expire on their own, so there is no second change to remember.

Every schedule change is kept

History on the Schedule header lists every version of the provider's schedule — what it was, when it applied, and who saved it. Past reporting always reads the schedule as it actually was, so editing hours today never rewrites last month's numbers.

Tie hours to a location (or all locations)

If your clinic has more than one location, every block belongs to a place — that's how the platform knows to offer a client the Downtown provider at Downtown, not across town.

Choose the location deliberately — "Any location" is not a safe default

A block saved with Any location makes the provider bookable at every site at those times — the most common scheduling mistake at multi-location clinics. Unless the provider genuinely covers all sites, pick the specific location on each block. Single-location clinics can ignore this.

Set the booking window, minimum notice, and buffers

These rules decide when a client may take an open slot, and they live in two places depending on whether the client is on a membership plan.

• For members, the rules live on the membership, under its join policy. Open Memberships & Services, choose the membership, and find the booking policy section. A membership can carry one policy for everything it covers, or a separate policy per service.
• For clients without a plan, set your organization's Booking window under Settings → Scheduling. Enter a minimum notice in hours and how many days ahead clients may book, then select Save. Leaving a box empty means no limit, which is how every organization starts.

In your client apps, a time outside the client's window shows as unavailable, and a booking outside it is refused with a plain explanation. Staff booking on a client's behalf are not held to either rule. Booking links you share set their own minimum notice on the link itself.

• Booking window — how far in advance a member may schedule (Maximum Booking Time, in days). 0 means unlimited. A tighter window keeps the far future flexible; a wider one lets loyal clients lock in standing times.
• Minimum notice — how much lead time you require before an appointment starts (Minimum Booking Time, in hours). 24 stops a member booking anything starting in the next day. 0 allows same-moment booking.
• Buffers — padding automatically held before and/or after an appointment so back-to-back bookings don't collide, giving your team time to prep the room or write notes. A buffer shrinks the bookable window around each existing appointment without you blocking time by hand.

Every service needs a slot length

A service with no slot length (duration) set produces no bookable slots, even when the provider's hours and location are perfect. Open the service, set its duration and start-time cadence (whether slots start on the hour, on the half hour, or every 30 minutes), and save — the cadence is what turns a block of hours into the individual times clients tap to book.

Connect your personal calendar (optional)

If you keep personal commitments on a Google Calendar, connect it from your own staff profile (the Connected calendar card) and times you're busy simply stop showing as bookable — no more mirroring dentist appointments into the clinic by hand.

Privacy

Ready Practice reads only busy/free times from a connected calendar — never event titles, attendees, or details. Only you can connect or disconnect your own calendar; disconnecting removes the stored access immediately.

Set clinic-wide scheduling defaults

For settings that apply across your whole clinic rather than one person or service, open Settings → Scheduling. This is where an admin sets the house defaults — the standard slot cadence, calendar behavior, and other scheduling preferences — so new staff and services start from sensible values instead of a blank slate.

Have Atlas set a provider's hours for you

You don't have to open the Schedule tab for every change. Tell Atlas — your AI assistant — what you want in plain language, and it prepares the change for you to approve. Nothing is saved until you confirm it, and every change Atlas makes is validated and recorded in the schedule's history exactly like one you made by hand.

Atlas handles the same four things you can do in the editor:

"Set Dr. Rivera's hours to Monday through Thursday, 9 AM to 5 PM, at the Downtown location."

"Make Sam bookable Tuesdays 8 to 2, but only for Lab Reviews."

"Dr. Rivera no longer works Fridays, starting the 1st of next month."

"Sam is off from November 3rd to the 14th." — or scope it: "Sam isn't at Downtown next week", "no Lab Reviews from Sam in August".

That last kind creates the same self-expiring dated exception the Reduced availability dialog does, so the normal schedule comes back by itself when the period ends.

Ask Atlas — what it needs from you

To set hours: the provider's name, the day(s), and a start and end time. Optionally the location — if you don't name one the hours apply at all of that provider's locations, so say it when it matters — and optionally the services those hours are limited to. You can also say when the change should start ("from the 1st"); leave it out and it takes effect today.

To remove hours: the provider's name and the day(s) to clear, plus a location if only one site's hours should go.

To make someone unavailable for a period: the provider's name and the first and last day. Add a location or a service to narrow it; say neither and they're unavailable entirely for those dates.

Remember: setting hours is what makes a provider bookable. Until a provider has hours, no slots appear for them anywhere — so this is usually the first thing to ask Atlas to do for a new team member.

Next steps

• Make sure clients have something to book → confirm each service has a duration, price, and assigned providers in Memberships & Services.
• Add the rest of your team → give each provider their own weekly hours and locations in Staff & Permissions.
• See it from the client's side → open your booking page and confirm the right slots appear at the right location before you invite clients.