A practitioner's availability is depicted in the calendar through the white space. By default, a practitioner is shown as available during the opening hours of the practice.

A practice with three practitioners open Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm, will show all three practitioners as available white space during those times.

Scheduling enables you to define the specific availability of individual practitioners, independently of the practice opening hours.

If a practitioner typically works Monday, Tuesday and a half day Wednesday, you can create a schedule to reflect this working pattern, meaning the calendar will show them as unavailable for the second half of the week. Or if one member of the team has an hour break to pick up their kids in the afternoon, you can mark them as unavailable during that time.

This removes the need to manually block off large parts of the calendar for certain practitioners and ensures your hours are currently reflected in your reporting.

Schedules can be found in 'Settings' > 'Diary'.

The schedule screen shows all practitioners for the chosen location. To create a new schedule, select the practitioner and click the '+ Create' button.

Check the name and location at the top of the screen to ensure you have selected the right practitioner and practice location.

Start date: The schedule must have a start date. It will default to the current date.

End date: This is optional. However, setting an end date will mean the schedule will stop being applied from that date and if there is no other schedule set to start from that date onwards, the practitioner's availability will revert to the practice opening hours. With no end date set, the schedule will run indefinitely.

Cycle: Selecting a multi-week cycle allows you to create a schedule that spans up to 4 weeks in length and repeats. The most common choice would be every week, but some practitioners might have another commitment once a month, for example - so this function gives you more flexibility.

Enable Schedule?: When you save your schedule it will be saved as active by default, unless you untick the 'Enable schedule?' check box before saving.

Once a you select a practitioner, their default schedule will be shown. The default schedule matches the opening days/hours of the practice.

You can update the 'Start' and 'End' times for each day by typing in the relevant box.

To make a practitioner unavailable for the entire day, click the calendar icon on the right of the row - click again to make them available again.

Breaks might help you to block out periods such as coffee or lunch breaks, and can be specific to each individual day.

To add a break, first click the two-headed arrow to the right of the day's start and end times. This opens the 'Breaks' option.

To add a break, click on the '+ Add break' button. Breaks are automatically set to a duration of 15 minutes.

Edit the start and end times, and a description to label your break - this will appear on the calendar. You can add as many breaks as required.

Repeat the two steps above to set the availability and breaks for each week of the cycle. Once you enable the Schedule, the availability will show in the Calendar.

The Calendar View

The 'Diaries' section gives you a list of practitioner availability for the dates set. You cannot change or edit anything from this screen.

To change or edit a schedule, you need to edit the schedule from the 'Schedules' menu.

To edit a schedule, first select the practitioner you want to edit. For multi-site practices, ensure you have the correct location selected in the filter at the top.

Click on the edit button (which looks like a pencil on paper 📝) to the right of the schedule. This opens the schedule for you to make the amendments needed. It will look the same as the creation screen explained above.

You can change the duration, add or remove breaks and add or remove days as desired.

Once you are happy with your changes, just click save. The changes will take effect immediately.

To delete a schedule, click on the bin icon 🗑️ to the right of the schedule.

Schedules can be layered giving you the ability to have everything active at the same time - such as the practitioner's normal working hours as well as any annual leave and any ad-hoc days that need opening or closing.

In the example below 👇 you can see that practitioner Rosie Driver has three schedules active all at once...

Schedule 1 - Normal working hours are set until February.

Schedule 2 - Normal working hours are set from March to October.

Schedule 3 - Diary closed for annual leave for two weeks in August.