There's a good chance that you want a little bit of "buffer time" in between when the next appointment is available, and when someone can actually book that appointment. 

For example, you probably don't want someone booking a 5:00 appointment on Friday at 4:59 p.m., especially if you're ready to head off and relax for the night!

This is where the "lead time" feature comes in! There are two places you can specify the lead time for an appointment:

We'll cover both of these below, along with some examples of how lead times affect your booking slots.

To set the default lead time, first head to to Settings, and then Online bookings:

Select a timeframe from the menu under Lead time required for bookings:

Once you've selected your lead time, save your settings, and you'll be good to go! 👌

To override the default lead time, you'll want to first head to Settings, and then Appointment types:

Select an individual appointment type from the list, and scroll down to Lead time for online bookings:

It will default to "Use online bookings settings", but you can change it by selecting a new time from the drop-down menu:
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Be sure to save your settings!

Lead times indicate the amount of time between now and when a patient sees the next available appointment time slot. There may be instances when a patient makes a booking at a time you don't expect, which we'll cover below.

The exact time shown to your patients is calculated as time now + lead time, rounded up to the nearest half hour (if it doesn't already land exactly on a half hour). If you pick a lead time of Now, 1 hour, or any option up to 18 hours, your patients may not see the time you'd expect due to this half-hour rounding.

For example, let's say you have appointments available between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. If you have your lead time set to 1 hour, and a patient is looking at your bookings page at 12:44 p.m., the earliest time they'd see is 2:00 p.m. This is because 12:44 p.m. + 1 hour = 1:44 p.m., which rounds up to 2:00 p.m.

Here's another example: if you have availabilities at 8:00 a.m., 8:20 a.m., 8:40 a.m., and so on, with a lead time set to 12 hours, a patient looking at your bookings page at 9:13 p.m. the night before will see 9:30 a.m. as the first available option. This is because 9:13 p.m. + 12 hours = 9:13 a.m., which rounds up to 9:30 a.m.

As shown above, you might expect bookings to fall neatly into your appointment's usual time blocks (like the 20-minute blocks in this example), but the half-hour rounding can sometimes shift the earliest available time outside of that pattern. There isn't a way to turn this rounding off. If you'd prefer to avoid it altogether, set your lead time to 1 day or longer instead.

A 1-day lead time is based on full calendar days, ensuring that same-day appointments aren’t available, no matter the time of day. It doesn’t mean patients have to wait exactly 24 hours before booking.

For instance, if it's Monday at 3:00 p.m. and you have a 1 day lead time, the earliest a patient can book is your first available time on Tuesday, even if that time is before 3:00 p.m. If it's Monday at 11:59 p.m., the earliest available booking will still be the first available slot on Tuesday, not 24 hours from the current time.

There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with online bookings. Learn more about setting them up and customising your settings right here!