This feature is available to subscribers to the TimeZest Professional and TimeZest Advanced plans.
Sometimes you want to limit the options that TimeZest presents to a particular customer, for a particular appointment, to something other than the default availability. TimeZest's date and time limits allow you to customize how TimeZest schedules an individual appointment, to have even more flexibility in how you schedule.
How TimeZest currently schedules
It will be useful to review how TimeZest currently schedules. At the moment, TimeZest looks at two settings on each appointment type to determine the earliest and latest days on which to offer an appointment to a client:
The minimum notice period specifies the minimum amount of time in the future when a customer can select a time. This is done to prevent the situation where a customer selects a time perhaps only 5 minutes in the future, which then comes as a surprise to the technician who will be taking the appointment.
The scheduling window determines the latest possible day a customer can schedule, relative to the current time. This is used to prevent customers from selecting times far into the future, when you may not want them to.
Between these two dates, TimeZest eliminates any configured holidays from the available days, then offers appointments according to the configured start and end times for the user (either in your PSA, or in TimeZest), and eliminates any that would clash with existing appointments.
Setting Per-Appointment Limits
If your plan has access to this feature, you'll see a new option in the TimeZest pod "Show Additional Options", which, when clicked, allows you to set different limits for the appointment, which only apply to that appointment.
Only allowing the client to schedule appointments after a particular date/time.
There are a number of different ways the additional options can be used to adjust how TimeZest schedules.
If you select only the first option and provide a date and optionally, time of day, TimeZest will ignore the minimum notice period configured for the appointment type and only offer appointments after the date/time you specify.
If the time of day is left blank, then TimeZest will use the start of business hours configured for the resource(s) being scheduled. The operation of the scheduling window will remain unchanged - TimeZest will calculate the last possible day relative to the time the client is scheduling.
Only allow the client to schedule appointments before a particular date/time.
If you select only the second option and provide a date and optionally, time of day, TimeZest will ignore the scheduling window configured for the appointment type and only offer appointments before the date/time you specify.
If the time of day is left blank, then TimeZest will use the end of business hours for the resource(s) being scheduled. The operation of the minimum notice period will remain unchanged - TimeZest will calculate the earliest possible time relative to the time when the client is scheduling.
Only allow the client to schedule appointments between 2 dates.
If you select both options and provide dates only (i.e. no times), TimeZest will only offer appointment slots on and between the two dates, and in the configured business hours for the resource(s) being scheduled. TimeZest will ignore the configured minimum notice and scheduling window for the appointment type in this case.
Allow the client to schedule between times/dates that differ from the configured business hours.
This logic differs from the above and could be a bit unexpected. If you provide both dates and times for both options, TimeZest will only allow the client to select an appointment between the dates specified, and between the times specified on each day where the resource is scheduled to work.
Importantly, this is the only case where TimeZest will ignore the configured availability for a resource. As well as limiting the times of day when a user can schedule, for example only before or after lunch, it also allows you to allow clients to schedule appointments outside of normal business hours.
In the example above, TimeZest would interpret those settings as "Only allow the client to schedule appointments between 10 am and 2 pm on those days between October 28th and November 2nd where the resource is already working".