The standard approach for letting CA know when you’re open for clients to schedule with you works pretty well.  You define your “typical week” (for example, something like “Mondays from 9 to noon, Tuesdays and Thursdays 2 to 5pm”), sync with your calendar of choice (so CA knows to carve out those specific times when you’re otherwise busy), and you’re done!  That leaves you with a routine set of blocks in a typical week, minus whatever time you’ve got blocked off for vacations/the odd dental appointment/whatever else comes up.

It takes all of about 5 minutes to set up, and serves as a 90% solution year round.

But SOMETIMES temporary variations on this theme apply, wherein from week to week you might need to deviate from your typical availability.  Perhaps your schedule’s opened up a little, or you’re working remotely in a different timezone, or you just want to try out a new schedule to see how it works.

For this CoachAccountable now allows you to define alternate availability rules that temporarily override that of your typical week.

In Settings >> Appointment Config >> Typical Availability, where you set the times you’re generally available each week, you’ll see an additional button, + Alternate Availability. 

Set the time frame you’d like this to apply to – either one particular week, or over a specific date range.

Then, select your availability by day during this time frame. Note that you’ll start with an exact copy of your current Typical Availability; add or subtract from that as desired.

Note that from here you can add another Alternate Availability – so if you’re someone whose schedule changes week to week, you may want to set several of these for the next few weeks.

Overlapping and Overriding

A couple things to keep in mind as you use the newly expanded appointment scheduling specificity:

• Alternate Availabilities take precedence over Appointment Type-specific Availability, meaning if an Alternate Availability applies for a day in question, an Appointment Type-specific availability rule will be ignored.
• If two Alternate Availabilities happen to overlap in time and apply to the same day, well… the system won’t stop you but to avoid confusion you’ll probably want to avoid doing that!  If you do it anyway, CA will use whichever one starts closer to that day (i.e. the one with the later start date).
• If you define two or more Alternate Availabilities that start on the same day, you’re definitely asking for trouble and CA gets to choose. :)
• If no Alternate Availability applies for a day in question, CA will use the Availability set for the given Appointment Type, if any.
• If none of those apply, the Typical Weekly Availability will be applied.

And that’s it! We’ve heard that this addition was the one thing keeping some users of Acuity, Calendly, or ScheduleOnce from fully switching over to CoachAccountable for scheduling, so we’re delighted to now meet all those needs.