How to manage your schedule with a rolling availability in Zoho Bookings?

Does your calendar look like this?

Barren on some days and flooded with appointments on others?

One of our customers was affected by the same.

He runs a photography business and opened his availability for the upcoming 8 weeks. He also preferred collecting his payments in person.

Since photography isn't the first thing that people had in their minds amidst their hectic days, people tried to book appointments as far away as possible. i.e., from weeks 6 through 8.

His calendar was sparsely booked during the first 5 weeks and jam-packed during the last few.

This indirectly caused a drop in his revenue. In such cases, this method goes a long way.

Why is this problematic?

1. You lose out on a ton of revenue during idle business time and during peak booking times, your staff are overloaded with appointments leading to burnout.

2. Customers book too far into the future and don't show up in the end.

All resulting in a loss of revenue and human effort.

So, let's settle this once and for all.

Introducing 'The Rolling Window'

Using this, you can
    1. Restrict customers from booking appointments based on your preferences
    2. Provide a short booking window (of 10 or 20-day duration) that you have complete control over

You achieve this by blending together the "Minimum and Maximum Booking Notice".

How to create a Rolling Window?

It helps you offer a restrictive way of availability to customers so that you have total control over your appointments.

Let's take a quick peek at minimum and maximum booking notice.

Minimum Booking Notice:

• Define when your customers should start booking appointments starting from the present day.
  
• For example, if today is June 6 and your minimum booking notice is set to 5, customers can start booking appointments only from June 11.
  

Maximum Booking Notice:

• Define until when customers can book appointments starting from the present day.
  
• For example, if today is June 6 and your maximum booking notice is 14, customers cannot book any appointments after June 20.
  

When you use minimum and maximum booking notice this way, you've enabled a 10-day rolling window.

With this, customers can book appointments only between June 11 and June 20.

On June 7th, customers can book appointments from June 12 to June 21.

On June 8th, customers can book appointments from June 13 to June 22.

Note - Holidays and Time-off work as usual within a rolling window. i.e., if you set up Sundays as holidays, they remain as holidays.

That's how easy it is. And the coolest part?

You need not lift a finger once you've set things up. The rolling fashion of availability progresses as the days pass.

You can set a 10, 20, 30, or any kind of rolling window of your choice that would suit your business style.

To set a minimum and maximum booking notice,

For one-on-one services - navigate to Service > Service Preferences > Booking Notice.

For group or resource bookings - Navigate to Settings > Workspaces > Choose a Workspace (where your group booking/ resource booking is present) > Policies and Preferences > Booking Notice.

In this tutorial, you've set up a rolling window by using both the minimum and maximum booking notice.

We hope you found the rolling window useful.

If you've any queries, feel free to reach out to us at hello@zohobookings.com. We'll be happy to help you out.

I want to try this!

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