How can I customize my availability with availability groups?

In some cases, the opening hours you've set for your business or yourself may not fully align with the demands of your online booking system. 

Example: You want to make certain types of appointments available for online booking on specific days of the week. 

For this tutorial, we’ll set up online appointments to be available only on Tuesdays 

In this case, you'll need to use availability groups to accomplish this.

Activating Availability Groups

You can enable availability groups in your 'Scheduler' settings:

https://www.colib.io/settings?show=scheduler

Creating Your Availability Group

Once the feature is enabled, you can click the "+ Add Group" link. This will open a modal where you can create your first group.

Select the appointments you want to include in this group and set the authorized schedule (days and hours) for it.

In this example, we’ve authorized online appointments only on Tuesdays.

As a result, online appointments are now only available on Tuesdays when clients attempt to book through the online booking system.

Important Considerations

1. An appointment type can be added to multiple availability groups. If an appointment type belongs to several groups, it will be available during the combined time slots of those groups.

Example: If you create a new availability group for Mondays and include the online appointment types, online appointments will be available for booking on both Mondays and Tuesdays.

2. If availability groups are enabled, appointment types that have not been added to any group will not be available for online booking. 

3. Ensure that the opening hours of your practice, as well as the personal working hours of your employees, are broader than the availability groups.

Example: If an availability group allows online appointments on Mondays between 7 AM and 9 PM, but your opening hours (or personal working hours) are set from 6 AM to 8 PM, clients will only be able to book online appointments between 7 AM and 8 PM. This is because the available booking times are determined by the overlap between the availability group and the opening hours for that day.