How BookSI decides available times

A time is shown only when the service can fit, the salon is open, at least one suitable employee can work the full appointment, and there is remaining service capacity. BookSI checks each rule again when the customer submits the booking, so a slot that was just taken cannot be double-booked.

BookSI starts by checking that online booking is enabled, the selected date is not a holiday closure, and the date has not passed the salon's next-day booking cutoff. The service must be enabled, not archived, and have a valid selected variant. The variant's duration, rather than the visual booking grid, determines how long the appointment needs.

The service must fit within an open business-hours range for that weekday. A service can also have custom booking hours; when it does, BookSI uses only the overlap between the service hours and salon hours. If base visibility ranges are configured, only those ranges are shown by default. Progressive availability can expand the shown ranges around existing appointments by the configured radius. Finally, hard hours can prevent a booking from starting outside a specific range, even if the appointment would otherwise fit.

Only employees who are active and enabled for online booking are considered. When a service has employee-service assignments, only employees with an enabled assignment can perform it. For every candidate employee, BookSI calculates working time in this order: holiday closure, time off, a date-specific override, the employee's weekly schedule, and then salon default hours. Employee working time is always clamped to salon business hours. Employee blocks, such as breaks or meetings, are removed from the remaining windows.

A resource can have more than one physical slot, for example multiple treatment rooms. A time remains available only when there is both physical capacity and at least one qualified employee free for the full service duration. Existing appointments marked cancelled or no-show do not block a slot. The configured buffer is applied around existing appointments when BookSI checks spacing and availability.

BookSI generates candidate start times using the salon's 15, 30, 45, or 60 minute booking grid. It also includes employee-window boundaries, so an employee who begins at an unusual time such as 18:15 can still receive an eligible booking. For today, any time at or before the current time is removed. The remaining slots are sorted before the customer sees them.

When customers choose an employee, BookSI validates that person is qualified, working, and still free for the complete service. When employees are hidden on the booking page, BookSI can distribute the booking automatically using the selected strategy: random, fewest bookings today, fewest booked minutes today, or round-robin. Hiding employees changes the booking flow, not the availability rules.

Check the service is enabled and has the expected duration. Then check service custom hours, salon hours, visibility ranges, hard hours, holiday closures, resource capacity, employee-service assignments, employee schedules, time off, blocks, and existing bookings plus buffers. Use the booking preview after every schedule or availability change to see the customer experience.