Date Range Actions
In tweaking your staff availability, you may not always want to change the hours that you're available on days within a certain date range. You may prefer to just change the date range that a certain availability applies to.
TimeTap provides a lot of options for maintaining and updating your schedule by using the "Date Range Actions" drop down that is on the top right of any of the date ranges of availability that your staff has set up. Those options include:
Each of these options can be used in a number of ways to make managing your availability quick and easy. In this documentation, we'll try to cover all the ways that you can manipulate your date range. If we miss anything, please feel free to contact our support team and we'd be happy to get you an answer.
Editing an existing date range of availability for a staff will just change the start and end date for that specific range. If you edit a date range and when you update it it conflicts with an existing date range, you will see the date range it conflicts with will update as well so that the edited date range takes priority.
In order to explain how you can edit date ranges, we will look at three different use cases:
Click on the links above to jump to the section in this documentation where we cover that directly.
Let's say you have availability setup from 11-01-2015 through 11-30-2015 from 8:00am to 5:00pm. You find out that you actually won't be working or accepting appointments for the last week in November due to some holiday traveling
You could, of course, add in a multi day time off to cover that last week of November, or you could come into Settings → Staff → Click on the "View Details" button next to the staff name whose availability needs to be updated and click on their "Availability" tab.
To update or edit that date range, navigate to the Availability tab in your staff profile and click the link to "Edit Date Range":
This will bring up the "Edit Dates of Date Range Availability" window where you can customize the effective starting date and end date of the availability. When it is pulled up, the dates will be pre-filled with the defined date range:
Since I don't want it to have my availability extend through the last week of November, I will select the effective through end date and pull it back a week:
Once I've got my date range defined, I'll go ahead and pres "Update Date Range" and I'll see the new range of availability replace the old date range:
It's a good idea from here to go ahead and click the blue "Preview Scheduler" button in the top right corner of your Staff Profile so that you can test how your availability will appear to clients who are trying to book with you. You can make sure as you are clicking through your scheduler that all the date ranges are appearing properly based on the edits you made.
You may find that during some periods throughout the year, you are switching up your availability every month. The holiday season usually comes with its own slew of scheduling challenges. You may have one schedule for November, one schedule for December, and then a totally different schedule at the start of the year.
Let's say this is the case for you and you have it set on your TimeTap account so that from 12-01-2015 through 12-31-2015 you have yourself available for appointments on Monday through Wednesday from 8:00am-12:00pm then 1:00pm-5:00pm. Starting on January 6th of the new year, however, you are going back to your tried and true schedule of Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 8:00am-12:00pm then 1:00pm-5:00pm. You'll be able to see this set up in your Staff Profile and navigate to the Availability tab:
Halfway through December, you've been on this holiday schedule and you decide that you really like front-loading your weeks. You would like to have Thursdays and Fridays off more often. You determine that you're going to continue with this schedule into the new year and see how things go. Besides, you can always switch back.
In order to extend your December availability into the new year, you go to that date range and press the "Edit Date Range" option:
On the "Edit Dates of Date Range Availability" window, you'll see the effective start and through dates are pre-populated with the values of the date range you're editing:
At this point, you have the choice of whether you want to have the availability stay in effect "Forever" (or indefinitely) and thus completely overwrite your availability starting January 6th, 2016 or you can choose to just extend the end date of your current schedule and push back the start of your Monday, Wednesday, Friday availability to February or some later date.
Let's say you choose to extend it "Forever". You can always come back and modify the availability later to go back to your Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. You select the radio button next to Forever and click "Update Date Range":
Because you will be conflicting with the schedule starting 01-06-2016 as well as extending your existing range of availability, you will get a confirmation message to make sure you want to do this:
Once you press the green "Confirm and Save" button your availability will update so that your previous date range of 12-01-2015 to 12-31-2015 will now read 12-01-2015 - Onward and your 01-06-2016 - Onward date range will have been removed from your availability tab:
As always, make sure to test the changes you made to your date range by clicking the blue "Preview Scheduler" button in the top right to quickly click through your client facing scheduler to make sure all availability is appearing as you expect it to.