Date Range Actions
- Lucy Barber (Unlicensed)
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:
- Editing date ranges in a closed date range of availability
- Editing a date range so that the new date range overlaps with another date range
- Editing date ranges of an "Onward" or indefinite date range
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.
There may be times where you want to change a set of availability that you have set to extend Onward indefinitely into the future and cap it to end on a certain date instead. This is also a simple and quick change to make with the "Edit Date Range" link in the "Date Range Actions" dropdown.
Simply navigate to the Availability tab of your Staff Profile find the date range in your availability that is set to extend "Onward". Click the "Date Range Actions" dropdown and select the option to "Edit Date Range":
When the "Edit Date of Date Range Availability" window pulls up, the effective start date will be pre-filled with the start date of the range you're editing and the end date will be selected as "Forever" (the equivalent of a date range moving "Onward"):
From here, you can just place your cursor in the date selector box beneath the "Forever" option next to the effective through portion to indicate the cut off date for this range of availability:
Once you select the date, just click "Update Date Range" and you'll see the date range that previously had extended "Onward" be capped with whatever date you selected (in this case 12-31-2015):
From here, you can click the "Preview Scheduler" button in the top right of your profile to make sure that your availability looks right in the client facing scheduler.
There are more methods for customizing and tweaking your schedule of availability for service based appointments. You can always:
We hope after reading through the documentation on editing date ranges, you have a good understanding on how to use the feature to make changes to your availability.
Splitting a date range is really beneficial when you have a change in your schedule that is coming at a specific time in a date range you already have set up.
In this example, staff person "Wallace Miller" has his regular availability set up to take appointments on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Starting on June 1st, however, he will begin to take appointments on Friday as well.
In order to do this, you'll first want to navigate to the "Availability" tab within the "Staff Profile" of the staff member whose schedule needs adjustment. From the "Availability" tab, find the date range of availability that the staff has set up, click the "Date Range Actions" dropdown, and select that you want to "Split into two date ranges":
This will present a window that will let you decide what date you want to split the date range on. In this case since I want the change in Wallace's schedule to start taking place on June 1st, I will select 6/1/2015 and press "Split Date Ranges":
This will break the availability ranges into two groups so I can make edits to one of the date ranges without affecting the other:
Now I can click the "Add Day" button underneath the 6/1/15 - Onward date range to add my availability for Friday:
Once it is added, you'll see that it's only available for the 6/1/15 - Onward date range and does not apply to the date range before it:
You can now treat these two date ranges as completely separate and edit the availability within each without affecting the other.
If you have any questions about splitting the date range of availability for your staff, please write into our support team and we'd be happy to answer those questions for you.
You can clone any date range with an actual end date (meaning it doesn't extend "Onward") to a new time period. Let's say, for instance, that during the holiday season you have a different schedule in December than you do in November or January. While you have defined your availability for December, you want to just clone your availability for November to start back again on January 1st.
To do this, go to your staff profile view and click the "Date Range Actions" dropdown next to the date range and select the option to "Clone availability for new date range":
From the window that pops up, select the date range period for when you want this availability to apply. In this example, I want the date range to be cloned to start on 1/6/2016 and to extend indefinitely into the future. Once I've filled in those dates, I'll press the button to "Clone Date Range":
This will create a new date range with the same availability as the date range I cloned from:
Again, you can only clone date ranges that have an exact end date. Also, you cannot clone date ranges into a period where availability is already set up for the staff. You would need to make sure whatever time period you are cloning to does not already have availability set up.
If you have a date range of availability set up during which you are no longer going to be able to accept appointments, you may want to remove that availability to keep your clients from booking on it. Sometimes this is more easily accomplished with just adding a Time Off, but if you are just plain not going to be available at a certain location where you've set yourself up for, you can quickly remove that available to keep clients from booking.
All you need to do is go to the Availability tab in your Staff Profile found underneath Settings → Staff → "View Details" next to the Staff name. Find the date range during which you are no longer going to be open for scheduling appointments and press the "Date Range Actions" dropdown to the right of the date range. From the date range actions dropdown, click the option to "Delete Date Range":
Once you press "Delete Date Range" you'll get a small window to confirm that you really want to remove your availability in this date range:
After confirming, that range of availability will remove itself from your Availability tab:
If you press the blue button to "Preview Scheduler" to test the change you've made to your availability, you'll see that the date range you've removed no longer shows up for booking:
If you want to know more about making changes to your schedule, you can always read our documentation on adding to and changing your availability found at the links below