In this article, you will learn the basics of Booking & Scheduling’s availability system to help get your session’s time slots up and running as easily as possible. In addition, this guide will also share some advanced tips and tricks to help fine-tune your availability, as well as walk through some common set-ups and questions.

To learn about setting up your session type in general, check out our article here.

In order to successfully set up a session type’s availability, you will need to let the system know what days and times you will be available to shoot. By default, our system will automatically generate time slots for a session type based on a 9 AM - 5 PM (Mondays to Fridays) availability but you can customize this to your exact availability within the Availability section’s List View or Calendar View.

Note: If you are looking to keep your availability open and have your clients request their preferred time and date instead of choosing a specific slot, you may like to skip ahead to our Common Set-ups section.

If you have a specific date where your availability is different from the weekly hours you’ve established, you can easily add this in the Date Specific Hours column:

Once you’ve set up your availability, use the Client View to quickly review how your time slots will appear to clients. Alternatively, you can select the Preview option in the top right hand corner for a more in-depth view of your client’s perspective while booking a session.

With Booking & Scheduling, your session type’s availability is ready to go as soon as you finish setting up your available hours! Based on your weekly hours and any date-specific hours, our system will automatically create time slots to ensure you are up and running as quickly as possible.

If you’d like to fine-tune your time slots even further though, as well as establish additional availability-based parameters, there are advanced options available in your session type’s Availability and Booking Rules sections.

Note: The following settings are intended to offer you additional flexibility when setting up your availability. If you’ve previewed your session type and its time slots are already appearing as you’d like them to, we recommend leaving these settings as-is.

The Show time slots in increments of setting is located at the bottom of your Availability section. This setting determines how your time slots will appear to clients when they book a session. Here are some examples of how a 9 AM - 5 PM availability will appear with the following time increments:

Since this setting affects how time slots appear, we always recommend reviewing your availability’s Client View if you make any changes. This will ensure the updated time slots are appearing as you intended.

The Availability Request setting appears at the bottom of your Availability setting. With it, you can determine whether clients can request for a specific session outside of your available time slots.

By default, your session type is set to Allow availability request. With this specific setting, your client can select a session based on the available slots they see, or they can submit an alternative date and time for your approval.

If you’d like to change this default setting, you have two alternative options: Do not allow availability request and Session by request only.

Located in your session type’s Booking Rules section, these settings allow you to determine how far in advance a client can book a session.

Note: If you choose to make adjustments, it is important to avoid making these settings too prohibitive, as this could prevent you from securing bookings. For example, if you set your minimum notice to 30 days, that means none of your clients will be able to book a slot within the current month!

Located in your session type’s Booking Rules section, the Want to block off time before/after a session setting allows you to set an amount of additional time to block off before and/or after a client’s confirmed session. This advanced option is handy if you need time to prepare between sessions, and would like to avoid back-to-back sessions.

If set up, it is important to keep in mind that a buffer time will only come into play after a session is confirmed. As an example:

Note: If you want to set up a buffer time in between every time slot, regardless of whether the slot has been booked, consider our suggested workflow here instead.

Booking & Scheduling’s availability system is intuitive and makes it easy to automatically set up time slots within your available hours. Below, we’ve listed some recommendations for common set-ups to help you get set up even more quickly.

Mini sessions are short, fun photography sessions, usually around 20-30 minutes in length each and stacked back to back on a certain date in the same location.

We’ve prepared a comprehensive article dedicated to setting up your mini sessions, which you can check out here.

If you want to set up time slots without any downtime in between, this is easy to do in a few steps!

If you want to introduce a gap between each of your time slots regardless of whether they’ve been booked or not, consider the following set-up. In this example, we will be introducing a 10 minute gap between each of our 20 minute sessions. You will be able to easily modify the steps to fit your requirements.

Instead of offering time slots, some session types (e.g. weddings) may be better suited for booking by request only. If this is the case, simply scroll down to the bottom of your session type’s Availability section. Under the Availability Request setting, select Session by request only in the dropdown menu.

When this option is selected, instead of seeing distinct time slots, your client will be asked to provide their preferred date and time (in addition to the standard client intake information). From there, you will receive their submission as an inquiry and will be required to approve/decline it.

Yes! Studio Manager’s Shared Availability feature allows you to manage a specific schedule that applies across a particular group of session types.

Creating a shared schedule is easy, and can be done in just a few steps. To create your first shared availability, click the Shared Availability button in the top right of your Session Types page (Studio Manager Dashboard > Bookings > Session Types). Once your shared schedule is created, you can easily assign it to any of your session types.

To learn more, check out our dedicated article here.

When a client books a session for any one of your available session types, our system will automatically block off the required time (i.e. the session duration and any buffer time) across all your session types. This means you will never need to worry about being double-booked in Studio Manager!

If you want to allow multiple sessions to overlap for whatever reason though, you can always manually set up the additional sessions in your calendar.

By default, your client will see your session’s time slots in the same time zone you’ve set up its availability in.

If your client would like to view your time slots in another time zone, they can do so by clicking on the time zone and selecting another option in the dropdown menu. In doing so, the time slots will automatically convert to their preferred time zone.

If you need to block off time across all your session types (e.g. for a vacation), our Google Calendar Sync feature is the best way to set this up. When you are checking for conflicts in your Google Calendar with the sync feature, all you need to do is set up the busy event in your connected calendar. Our system will automatically take care of the rest by ensuring clients cannot book any time slots that fall within that busy event.

Note: If you have not connected your Google Calendar to Studio Manager yet, go to your Calendar page and click Calendar Sync to get started.

Alternatively, if you do not use Google Calendar, you can apply the unavailable time to all session types with the Calendar’s built-in Block Off Time option. You can learn more about this feature here.

If you need to set yourself as unavailable for a single session type, you can easily set this up in the session type’s Date Specific Hours section.

For example, this can come in handy if you typically offer Kids & Newborn photoshoots but plan to dedicate an upcoming Friday for holiday mini sessions. After setting up your mini sessions as a separate session type, you would want to return to your “Kids & Newborn” session type and block off that specific Friday to ensure no one can book you for a photoshoot while you’re busy fulfilling the holiday minis.

If you want to block off time across all your session types though, you can apply the unavailable time to all session types with your Calendar’s Block Off Time section. For example, this would come in handy if you have a week off for a personal vacation, where you won’t be doing any shoots at all. To learn more about blocking off unavailable time across every session type, click here.

Have you set up your availability but you are not seeing your time slots appear as expected? For guidance, check out our troubleshooting guide here.