The double booking nobody can explain
A client books online for Tuesday at two. The stylist already had a client at two, written in her Google Calendar. Both turn up. The booking tool did nothing wrong: it offered the slot because, as far as it knew, the slot was free. The problem is that the tool and the stylist's calendar were not telling each other the truth.
Calendar sync is the part of online booking that owners assume just works and that is misconfigured on most of the sites we inherit. Here is what it actually does, and how to set it up so the diary is one diary.
One-way versus two-way
One-way sync pushes bookings from the tool into the calendar. Your Google Calendar shows the online bookings. It does not send anything back. A personal appointment, a lunch, a blocked hour typed into Google is invisible to the booking tool, which will happily book over it.
Two-way sync also reads the calendar. Events in Google or Outlook block availability in the booking tool. That is the configuration you want, and it is not the default in every tool.
Check yours: create an event in your calendar for tomorrow morning, then try to book that slot on your own site. If the slot is offered, you have one-way sync.
Which calendar is the truth?
Decide, once, which system is the master. There are two sane answers.
The booking tool is the master. Staff block time in the booking tool, not in Google. Google receives bookings for viewing only. Simple, and the tool's availability is always correct. The cost is that staff must use the tool's app to block time, and they will forget.
The personal calendar is the master, with two-way sync. Staff live in Google or Outlook as they always did. The tool reads their busy time and writes bookings back. More natural for most teams. The cost is that sync has a delay and some edge cases.
What does not work is both: some staff blocking in the tool, others in Google, and one-way sync between them. That is how the Tuesday-at-two clash happens.
The edge cases that cause clashes
Sync delay. Most tools poll the calendar every few minutes. A personal event added thirty seconds before a client books can slip through. Rare, but real. Tools that use push notifications from Google shorten the window.
All-day and multi-day events. Some tools ignore all-day events as busy time. A day off entered as an all-day event may not block bookings. Enter it as a working-hours block instead, or check the tool's setting.
Events marked "free". Google and Outlook let an event be marked as showing free rather than busy. Tools respect that flag. A tentative event marked free will not block.
Shared calendars. If a staff member's availability lives on a calendar that is shared but not owned by the connected account, the tool may not see it. Connect the calendar that actually holds the events.
Time zones. A staff member whose phone is set to a different time zone, or a calendar created in one zone and viewed in another, can shift every event by an hour. Set the tool, the calendar and every device to the business's time zone, explicitly.
Recurring events. Some tools read the first instance of a recurring event and miss the rest. Test a weekly recurring block.
Buffers, travel and set-up
Sync tells the tool when you are busy. It does not tell it that you need fifteen minutes between clients to clean the room, or forty to drive to the next house. Configure those in the tool: a buffer per service, travel time for mobile work, and set-up time for treatments that need it. Then the synced calendar shows the reality, including the gaps.
A five-minute test after setup
- Create a personal event in the staff member's calendar for a slot tomorrow. Try to book it online. It should not be offered.
- Book a slot online. It should appear in the calendar within a few minutes, with the client's name and service.
- Cancel that booking in the tool. The calendar event should disappear.
- Move the calendar event to a different time in Google. Check whether the tool follows. Most do not; know which yours does.
- Enter an all-day day off. Try to book that day.
Anything that fails is a setting to change before real clients find it.
Where this fits in a booking setup
Configuring two-way sync, choosing the master, setting buffers and running the tests above is part of every booking setup we do, and it is the step most often skipped when a booking tool is bolted onto a site without anyone thinking about the diary. The tool is easy. The diary is the work.