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Working hours, breaks and closures
How opening hours, each person's own hours and time off combine to decide when customers can book β including split shifts and days that run past midnight.
Bookodile never asks "when are you open?" just once. Availability is an intersection: the business's hours, the specific person's hours, and anything blocking the calendar all have to agree before a time is offered.
Understanding that one idea explains most availability surprises.
The layers
| Layer | Where you set it | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Business hours | Settings β Working hours | The outer bound. Nothing is bookable outside it. |
| Each person's hours | That team member's own hours | Narrows the business hours further, never widens them |
| Time off | Calendar | Removes specific dates |
| Calendar blocks | Calendar | Removes specific stretches of a day |
A person cannot be booked outside business hours even if their own hours say otherwise. The narrower of the two always wins.
Split shifts are supported directly
A day can hold up to four separate ranges. A genuine split shift β 09:00β12:00 and 15:00β19:00 β is expressed as two ranges on the same day, not faked with a calendar block.
This matters because a block and a closed period behave differently elsewhere: a block is a thing on your calendar, a closed period is simply not open. For a lunch break you take every day, use two ranges.
Days that run to midnight, and past it
A day can be marked as full-day, which makes it open for the whole 24 hours. This is what venues and rentals use.
For anything that runs past midnight, bookings are not designed to cross the
day boundary unless the service is a full-day one. A late-night service ending
at 01:00 needs the day it starts on to be open until at least 01:00 β so a
closing time of 24:00 is meaningful and a closing time of 01:00 on the same
row is not.
The whole appointment has to fit
A time is only offered if the entire service fits inside working hours, not just its start.
Close at 17:00 and offer a 90-minute service, and the last bookable start is 15:30. Customers frequently read the empty 16:00 slot as a bug. It is the service not fitting.
Buffer time counts too: a 30-minute service with a 15-minute buffer needs 45 minutes of room before closing.
Changing hours does not move existing bookings
Narrowing your hours has no effect on bookings already in the calendar. They stay exactly where they are β you will simply see them sitting outside the shaded open period.
That is deliberate. Silently cancelling or moving a customer's appointment because someone edited a settings page would be worse than showing you the conflict. If a booking now falls outside your hours, move or cancel it yourself so the customer is told.
Worked example
A studio open Monday to Friday 09:00β18:00. One instructor works Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 10:00β14:00.
- Tuesday: the studio is open, the instructor is not rostered. Their booking page says so by name rather than showing an empty week.
- Monday 09:30: the studio is open, the instructor is not. Not offered.
- Monday 13:30 for a 60-minute class: the instructor's day ends at 14:00, so the class does not fit. Not offered.
- Monday 13:00 for a 60-minute class: fits exactly. Offered.
Limits
- Four ranges per day is the maximum.
- A person's hours can only narrow the business's, never extend them.
- Time off and blocks look identical to a customer. Both simply mean no times β the booking page never says which, and never says "fully booked", because from outside those are indistinguishable.
- Each branch has its own hours. A second location does not inherit changes made to the first after it was created.