Microsoft Bookings Hours and Availability

Description

Microsoft Bookings is a turnkey solution for booking appointments with staff and faculty for office hours and departments for various services.  Bookings integrates with employee's Outlook calendars to determine availability (Blocked off time in Outlook will not be available in Bookings).  However, there are there are no less than FOUR places where hours can be set in Bookings:

1. Staff Availability
2. Services Hours
3. Booking Page Hours
4. Business Information Hours

These often cause confusion as to what will be displayed on the public calendar where "clients" RSVP services.

Details

Bookings hours precedence is as follows:

1. Staff Availability: Customizing employee working hours ensures that their availability is accurately shown when customers try to book them. By default, the working hours for each employee matches the business hours established in the Microsoft Bookings app. However, employee hours can extend beyond the business hours earlier or later. Since services are associated with staff, the staff person's availability takes precedence.
    
2. Services Hours: If a scheduling policy exists at both the service level and the business level, the service-level policy takes precedence. This means that the hours set for individual services will override other settings.
    
3. Booking Page Hours: The hours set on the Booking Page determine when customers can see available time slots for booking appointments. It’s important to ensure that the time zone settings here are correct to reflect your business’s local time.  Here is how they function:
    
   1. Visibility Control: The Booking Page Hours control the visibility of your schedule to the public. If you set these hours from 9 AM to 4 PM, customers will only see available slots within this time frame. The schedule will be hidden outside of these hours.
       
   2. Overrides Business Hours: If your Booking Page Hours are narrower than your Business Information Hours, they will limit the time slots visible to customers, effectively hiding the schedule outside these hours.
       
4. Business Information Hours: These are the default hours that apply to your business as a whole. Unless overridden by staff or service-specific hours, these are the hours that will be displayed to customers.

Remember, it’s essential to have consistency across these settings to avoid confusion for both your staff and customers. Always double-check that the hours set in each section align with how you want your business to operate and how you want your availability to be presented to customers.