The purpose of this article is to help you understand: 

  • Reasons why no dates/times are showing on the booking form
  • How to correct common availability issues

 

Why is there no availability on my booking form? 

Based on previous issues others faced with their forms, we put together a guide to help you solve the problem(s) you are experiencing.    The majority of these issues involve the following sections:

  • Scheduling settings
  • Provider settings
  • Booking spots

 

Missing Locations or Providers

When you first go inside your account, you will see that it is pre-loaded with fake test data.  This is to show you what the dashboard and system will look like when it's been set up with your store options, customers, providers, bookings, and more. 

When you are ready to create real bookings, schedule customers, and add providers, you'll need to remove the test data from the system. Specifically, this means removing the fake customer, the fake provider and fake team, the test location, all the fake job history, all the fake upcoming bookings, and all the fake charges. 

  • Click here to learn how to flush your test data.  

Please note: Flushing the test data will NOT affect any of the store settings that you may have changed, new industries you've added, and form components like frequencies, service categories, pricing under items/add-ons/packages/pricing parameters/variables, and extras.

Since the test location is now gone, you will have to go in and either create a Service Area (if your providers travel to customers' homes) or a Merchant Location (if your customers come to your providers in a storefront) and you will need to save that. 

  • Click here to learn how to set up your location(s). 

Next, you will need to add a new provider. For this, you can use it yourself but you will need to use a different e-mail address than the one you signed up with. This is because the system only allows one email address per account. When you add yourself to the system, it will automatically create a schedule for you from 8 am to 6 pm unless you've disabled this option in the store settings.

  • Click here to learn how to add a provider to your account. 

If your scheduling is based on provider availability (click here to learn how to set up your scheduling settings to be based on provider availability), you must have at least one available provider so your booking spots will display (bookings spots will be discussed later in this article). 

You can open a provider's availability by setting up their schedule.  If you offer recurring services and want to assign the same provider for all appointments, be sure to add default availability so customers can book recurring dates and times.  

  • Click here to learn how to set up provider schedules.  

You will now be able to go test your form by scheduling a customer from the front-end and back-end of the platform. 

 

Missing Booking Spots

If your locations and provider schedules are set up, the next place you will want to check is the booking spots or the times you offer to clients to schedule their service. When you first sign up for your BookingKoala account, your store comes with built-in default booking spots so you can test out your availability settings.  The default bookings spots are set up as fixed start times for:

  • Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday
  • Every hour from 8 AM to 5 PM (ex: 8 AM, 9 AM, 10 AM, etc until 5 PM)

However, if you modified or removed the default spots, this may result in no dates or times showing on your booking form.  

  • Click here to learn how to set up booking spots for your business.

If your business has enabled spot limits, these will control how many jobs are booked per day/date.  If the number of spots is set to "0", the customer will not be able to select any times for those days.

  • Click here to learn how to enable or disable booking spot limits in the scheduling settings.

It is also possible to enable different booking spots per location.  If your business uses this option, It is important to check that each location has spots added.

  • Click here to learn more about how to set up and add booking spots for different locations.

Once you set up your booking spots, you will be able to go test your form by scheduling a customer from both the front-end and back-end.