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OutSmart Guide

Setting Up Your Hours Of Operation

Hours of Operation are a type of Background Event in the calendar. They serve two purposes — visually showing your working hours on the calendar, and, more importantly, defining the windows during which patients can book appointments through your online booking page.

In practice, Hours of Operation are the foundation of online booking. Without them, your online booking page has no idea when you’re available, so it can’t offer patients any slots to choose from. A clinic that books exclusively through staff manually in the calendar can run without ever setting Hours of Operation; a clinic that takes online bookings cannot.

Creating Simple Hours Of Operation

Hours of Operation are created the same way as any other event in your calendar. They can be one-off or repeating, they can stop and resume at any point in time, and they can be deleted and moved around.

  1. Click anywhere in the calendar to open the Calendar Event Editor.
  2. Select the Hours of Operation event type.
  3. Set the day, the start and end times, and any repeating pattern (for example, weekly every Monday).
  4. Click Save.

The event is created as a Background Event — it sits behind your regular events on the calendar instead of taking up the foreground. Background events can be edited, but you need to double-click them to open the editor (a single click is reserved for regular events).

Editing Hours Of Operation

Double-click any Hours of Operation event to open the editor.

If you’re editing a repeating series, a dialog will ask you to choose the scope of the change:

  • This event — modifies only the specific event you double-clicked. The series splits into the events before, this single instance, and the events after.
  • This and following events — modifies this event and every future event in the series. The series splits in two: everything before stays as it was, everything from now on takes the new settings.
  • All events — modifies every event in the series, including past and future.

Blocking Off Your Schedule

Hours of Operation define when you’re available. To block off specific times within those hours — vacation, lunch, training, anything — create a non-patient event in the Event Type Manager (call it “Vacation”, “Lunch”, “Meeting”, whatever fits), then book it into your calendar like any other event.

A blocked-off event sits on top of your Hours of Operation and prevents online bookings during that time. Staff can still manually book patients into a blocked slot if they need to — the block only restricts online booking.

How Hours of Operation Drive Online Booking

When a patient lands on your online booking page and picks a service:

  1. OutSmart looks at the Hours of Operation events that apply to the selected practitioner (and, if you’re using event-type or resource restrictions, the relevant ones).
  2. Inside those hours, OutSmart subtracts any existing bookings and any blocked-off events.
  3. What’s left is the patient’s available choices, offered to them according to your Magnetic Booking setting and scheduling interval defaults.

If you’ve set up Advanced Hours of Operation — restricting hours by event type or by room/resource — those rules apply on top of the basic hours.