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    Restricting Services to particular Days: Part 1

    Mark Demicoli  10 January 2014 11:12:19 PM
    Greetings ClickBookers,

    We have just released a much requested feature. It is now possible to restrict certain services to only be available on particular days of the week, and between particular times.  In the past, we have recommended that 'alias' staff members can be used to do this, which requires another email address and basically is a bit too tricky to really recommend, so we decided to make it easier.

    It is now quite simple to do it without any special tricks.

    As always, an example is the best way to show-n-tell.

    Lets say we have a 1 hour service that we only want available on Tuesdays between 9AM and 12PM for Staff Member X.  In our case Staff Member X will be Roger Tester.

    1. From the Services tab, edit the service and Un-select all staff, then click Update. We unsellect ALL staff to keep things simple.  If we need this service to be available in normal availability, it's best to create another similar service just for that purpose, or conversely, create a new service for special availability.

    Image:Restricting Services to particular Days: Part 1

    2. Now, we expose the service availability using an Available TimeBlock.  Firstly, select a staff member from the Resource Calendars panel, for which we want to expose the service for availability.  If we want to expose it for more than 1 staff, we create one first then use the Copy tool from the appointment listing - more on that in Part 2.

    After selecting a staff member, we select the correct starting day from the main view.  The first coming Tuesday in this case is Jan 21 2014, then select TimeBlock - Available from the Custom Appointments panel:

    Image:Restricting Services to particular Days: Part 1


    Since we already selected the correct date, the TimeBlock will have defaulted the Start Date, so we don't need to touch this.

    The Start Time needs to be changed to 9AM, and the Duration changed to 3 hours (see below).

    Image:Restricting Services to particular Days: Part 1

    Toward the middle of the form, we open Locations and Services, click Add / Remove and select the special service that we are exposing for Tuesday 21st between 9AM and 12PM:

    Image:Restricting Services to particular Days: Part 1


    TIP    : If we want to force appointments to start on-the-hour (ie 9AM, 10AM and 11AM), we enter Custom Start Times for Tuesday (see below).


    Image:Restricting Services to particular Days: Part 1


    Now we click SAVE and test to see if it worked.

    From the Services panel, select the special service. If everything is right, we should see the selected day available for booking.  Clicking on the day should bring up 9AM, 10AM and 11AM timeslots for our selected staff member:


    Image:Restricting Services to particular Days: Part 1

    In Part 2, we get a bit more fancy.  We show you how to extend our special service so that it is available EVERY TUESDAY rather than just the single day in the example, and then we look at how to easily copy or re-assign the special availability to other staff members.