PLATFORM · CAPABILITY

Scheduling and availability

Scheduling in EveryonePlans covers three different problems that usually need three different tools: the team calendar, public self-service booking against real availability, and finding a time that works for a group of people who do not share a calendar.

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01THE PROBLEM

Why this is worth having

A shared calendar answers "when is Dave free". It does not answer "when can a customer book Dave without asking", and it certainly does not answer "which of these four evenings works for eleven people". Most businesses solve the second with a separate booking product and the third with a group chat and a lot of patience.

02HOW IT WORKS

The mechanism

Availability is derived from real commitments — jobs, events and existing bookings — rather than maintained as a separate calendar somebody has to keep accurate.
A public booking page exposes only bookable time, with the rules you set: notice period, duration, buffer, who can book what.
Availability polls ask a group for the times that work for them and show you the overlap, for the cases where nobody involved has a calendar you can see.
Everything scheduled is a record like any other, so it can trigger a reminder, appear on an invoice, or be read over the API.

02bWITHOUT SIGNING IN

What it looks like.

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Scheduling and availability — screenshot

REAL SCREEN CAPTURE, NOT GENERATED. A week view with real bookings on it, and the public booking page beside it showing genuine open slots. Capture at 1600x900 with believable seeded data — real-looking names, dates within the next two weeks, non-round money amounts — and blur anything identifying a real customer.

DROP AT/art/screens/scheduling-and-availability.png

03WORKED EXAMPLE

A booking that books itself

You publish a booking page for site visits, thirty minutes, two days’ notice, no more than three a day.
A customer picks a slot from the page on your own website. It is a real slot, because the availability came from your actual commitments.
The visit is created, assigned, and added to the schedule; a confirmation goes out under your brand.
A reminder fires the day before without anybody scheduling it, because the reminder is a rule attached to the type of appointment, not a task on somebody’s list.

04QUESTIONS

About scheduling and availability

Do you have public booking pages?

Yes — a bookable resource can publish a page that shows genuine availability and takes bookings without a login. It reflects real commitments rather than a calendar kept in parallel, which is why the slots on it can be trusted.

What is availability polling for?

It is for finding a time across a group of people whose calendars you cannot see — a committee, a volunteer crew, a family. Each person marks what works and the overlap is shown, which is the part a shared calendar cannot do.

Can I put booking on my own website?

Yes. The booking surface is available over the API, so you can either link out to the hosted page or build the whole flow into a site you own.

05READ NEXT

TRY IT

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