Smart scheduling guide

Smart scheduling is how Taimli fills your calendar sensibly: it assigns a professional automatically, keeps small gaps out of your day, and blocks extra time around appointments. The main controls live in Settings > Booking & availability, in the Booking Settings panel, plus one field on each service variant.

Scheduling controls at a glance

Open Settings and find the Booking & availability section. Five controls there decide how customers book:

The Calendar hours control in the same panel changes only the hours visible on your admin calendar. It doesn't change the times customers can book (see Choose the hours shown on your calendar). Each worker can override the time slot interval for their own calendar in My Preferences.

Automatic professional assignment

When the customer doesn't pick a specific professional, Taimli assigns one automatically when the booking is submitted. The Choose a professional step in the booking flow shows Any available professional as the first option; customers who pick it go straight to time selection, and the professional is chosen when they submit the booking.

The step itself only appears when Let customers choose a professional is on and more than one qualified professional can perform the selected services. With one qualified worker or none, Taimli assigns the professional automatically and the customer never sees the step.

Automatic assignment rotates through your workers in order, so bookings are shared instead of always landing on the same worker. A worker is only eligible if they:

• Can perform every selected service (see Managing Staff Capabilities)

• Are available for the whole appointment time, including buffer

• Have no conflicting appointment on their calendar

• Pass your gap prevention and minimum lead time rules

Gap prevention

The Gap prevention setting decides whether customer booking times should avoid creating small gaps in the calendar. It has six options:

• Off: customers can book any valid start time. Small gaps between appointments are possible.

• Reduce calendar gaps: offered start times follow a cadence based on the longer of the selected service's full blocked duration (including buffer) or your protected gap. The protected gap comes from your longest service variant's duration plus buffer, capped at 120 minutes.

• Back-to-back bookings (first booking unrestricted): once the window has at least one appointment, only start times directly touching an existing appointment stay bookable. In an empty window, every start time remains.

• Back-to-back bookings: the same rule once an appointment exists, but in an empty window only the first and last start times remain bookable.

• Strict gap prevention: when a window has an appointment, only start times packed against that appointment or against an open edge of the window stay bookable. Middle slots are removed. In an empty availability window, only the first and last start times remain bookable.

• Strict gap prevention (first booking unrestricted): behaves the same way once the window has at least one appointment, but in an empty availability window it keeps every generated start time.

Gap prevention applies both when Taimli generates the slots customers see and when it validates a submitted booking. If a customer submits a time that is no longer valid, they see "That time is not available anymore, please choose another time." and return to time selection.

Buffer time on a service variant

The Buffer field in New Service and Edit Service adds blocked time, in minutes, after the appointment (see Create and manage service variants). Set it separately for each variant, for example for cleanup between clients.

Buffer extends the blocked time on the calendar but not what the customer sees. A 30-minute service with a 15-minute buffer blocks 45 minutes of the worker's calendar while the customer books what looks like a 30-minute appointment. Buffer doesn't move the start time later; it reduces how many start times fit in a window, and can make a window too short to book at all.

When a customer books several services, the durations and buffers add up: a 30-minute service with a 30-minute buffer requires 60 minutes of worker availability. Buffer also feeds the protected gap used by Reduce calendar gaps.

Common booking limitations

These rules decide whether a start time is bookable, and each one can silently remove slots:

• Availability: customers can only book inside the slots you've opened (see Setting Up Your Availability).

• Capabilities: a booking needs a worker qualified for every selected service, unless Visits with several professionals assigns a different qualified professional to each service. Services without any qualified worker can't be booked online.

• Time slot interval: start times are offered every 15, 30, 60, or 90 minutes. Availability that starts off the grid is rounded up to the next interval.

• Minimum lead time: by default, slots less than 2 hours away are hidden (see Setting Minimum Booking Lead Time).

• Buffer: the full duration plus buffer must fit in the worker's availability, even though the customer only sees the service duration.

Visits with several professionals

When Visits with several professionals is on and no single professional can perform every selected service, the booking becomes a visit with a professional for each service instead of one professional for the whole booking. The services run one after another in the order the customer picked them; see Book a visit with multiple professionals.