Business settings
Scheduling & business hours
Business hours, time slots, the instant booking picker, reschedule rules and blocked dates -- and where booking capacity and deposits actually live, which is not on this screen.
This applies to both workflows
What are the two workflows?Settings > Scheduling controls when you are open and what happens around a booking. It does not control how much you take, which is the single biggest source of confusion in the product.
Booking capacity is not on this page
Maximum morning and afternoon bookings per day, the earliest bookable day (buffer_days), and how far ahead customers can book (booking_window_days) all live under Settings > Pricing > Load Tiers. Anyone configuring availability looks here first and never finds them.
What is on this screen
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Business Hours | Open and close time per day. A closed day cannot be booked online. If you rent dumpsters, each open day also carries a Drop off and a Pick up tick -- see below. |
| Time Slots | Slot duration, max jobs per slot and the buffer between jobs. These shape the times the chatbot suggests. Customers booking on your page choose Morning (8-12) or Afternoon (12-5), which are fixed. |
| Booking Rules | The chatbot's minimum lead time, in hours. |
| Instant Booking Times | The Show instant booking-time picker switch and, with it on, the Same-day cutoff time. Junk jobs only -- see Your quote form. |
| Reschedule & Cancellation | Whether customers can reschedule themselves, how close to the appointment, and how many times. |
| Missed Job Detection | How long past a scheduled time before a job is flagged as missed. |
| Blocked Dates | One-off closures: holidays, a week off, a full yard. See below. |
| Dumpster Rentals | The closed-day pricing policy -- see Equipment & units. |
Deposits are not on this page either
They used to be. Everything about deposits -- the amount, which job sizes, weekends and far-out bookings, and where the customer is asked -- is one page under Settings > Money > Deposits. See Deposits.
What is on Pricing > Load Tiers instead
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Max morning / afternoon bookings per day | How many bookings you accept in each slot per day. |
| Earliest a customer can book (days) | 0 means same-day is allowed; 1 means tomorrow at the earliest. |
| How far out customers can book (days) | How far into the future customers can book. |
They live there for a historical reason -- capacity was originally a property of junk load tiers -- and they apply to both workflows. See Load tiers & capacity.
The order to set these in
- 1Set your business hours honestly. Everything else is filtered by them.
- 2Set your time slots to match how you actually dispatch.
- 3Go to Pricing > Load Tiers and set your per-day caps to what you can really service.
- 4Set Earliest a customer can book (days) -- 0 if you take same-day work, 1 if you need a day of notice.
- 5Add known blocked dates before you go live, not after somebody books them.
Drop-off days and pickup days (dumpster rentals)
A dumpster rental is two trips, and they do not cost you the same. A drop-off is twenty minutes. A pickup ends at the scale, and if the dump lines are long on a Saturday that pickup costs you the day. So each open day carries two ticks: Drop off and Pick up. Untick Pick up on Saturday and you can still win the weekend rental without spending Saturday in a queue.
The day switch still wins
The checkbox at the front of the row is the one that says whether you work at all. A closed day is closed for both trips, whatever the two ticks say -- the ticks only split up a day you are already open on. Leave them both ticked (which is how every account starts) and nothing changes.
- Customers are not offered a day for a trip you do not run on it. The calendar will not let them pick it and the booking is refused if they try anyway.
- When the pickup date it suggests lands on a day you do not collect, it moves to the next day you do, and the customer is told why.
- Your own New Booking screen follows the same two rules, so you cannot book yourself a pickup you would not make.
- Your rental lengths do not change. A rental runs for whatever was booked; it is not stretched because you do not collect on Sundays.
- If your closed-day pricing policy is Don't charge for closed-day gaps, a day you will not collect on counts as one of those gaps -- the customer is not billed for a day they could not have ended the rental on.
Blocked dates
A blocked date is a day nobody can book online, whatever your hours say. Add Date adds one row; Add US Holidays adds the federal holidays for this year and next in one go, skipping any already on the list. The list is kept in date order, and dates that have passed are folded away under N past dates with a Show toggle and a Clear past dates button -- a past blocked date does nothing anywhere, so clearing them is safe. Nothing is written until you press Save.
Common mistakes
"I cannot find where to limit bookings per day."
It is under Settings > Pricing > Load Tiers, not Scheduling.
"Customers cannot book tomorrow and I want them to."
Earliest a customer can book (days) is set to 1 or more. Set it to 0. Also under Pricing > Load Tiers.
"I closed Saturday but a Saturday booking came through."
Business hours gate new online bookings, not existing ones. A junk job you create yourself bypasses them; a dumpster booking you enter by hand does not -- it is refused on a closed day. Check the date was closed before the booking arrived.
"A customer could not pick Saturday for their dumpster and I am open Saturday."
Check the Pick up tick on Saturday under Business Hours. If it is off, Saturday is still offered for the drop-off and refused for the pickup, which is what that setting is for. The message the customer sees says so -- it does not tell them you are closed.
"Where did Booking Deposits go?"
To its own page: Settings > Money > Deposits, which now holds the amount, the job sizes it applies to and the channel switches together. See Deposits.