Mastering Google Calendar Appointment Schedules: A Complete Guide

Setting up your schedule

Before you can offer bookable appointment slots, you need to define your availability. This involves specifying the dates and times you’re available for appointments, whether they’ll be held in-person, by phone or on Google Meet, and the duration of each one. (Appointments have to be a minimum of 5 minutes long.) For even greater flexibility, you can further customise your schedule with features like adding buffer time between slots, limiting the number of bookings per day and determining a booking notice period; these features, as well as others, are covered in more detail later.

All of this information is then displayed on a booking page where others can see your availability and self-book appointments. To prevent conflict with new and existing events on your calendar, the booking page will automatically update to make sure you’re only offering times you’re free. This saves you the effort of finding suitable slots or rescheduling appointments you can’t attend.

Handling bookings

Once someone chooses a slot and completes the booking form, both you and the booker will receive a confirmation email containing a Google Calendar invitation for the appointment. If you’ve chosen to host the appointment on Google Meet, a video conferencing link will be automatically included in the invitation for people to join the call in only a few clicks.

Booked appointments will automatically appear on your Google Calendar alongside your other scheduled events and Google Tasks. This eliminates the need to manually enter them and provides a holistic view of your day, week, month or year (depending on your Calendar view) to help organise your workload. The slot is also removed from the booking page to prevent double bookings.

Appointments

• Invite co-hosts: ask up to 20 people to co-host appointments with you, ensuring every relevant person is included. You can even check their availability (as long as you have permission to view their calendar) to minimise scheduling conflicts and add entire Google Groups as co-hosts to save time.
• Allow guests to invite others: enable the “Guests can invite” option when setting up or editing your schedule so that invitees and co-hosts can add additional guests or meeting rooms to booked slots, streamlining appointment coordination.
• Email verification: opt to have users verify their email address before scheduling an appointment to prevent malicious bookings.
• Paid appointment bookings: offer and accept payment for appointments, streamlining administrative tasks and giving customers the convenience of making payments right at the time of booking.
• Delegate management: delegate someone else, such as an administrative assistant, to edit and delete appointment schedules on your behalf to help manage your time efficiently.
• Email reminders: enable automatic email reminders to notify booked clients about upcoming appointments and reduce the chance of no-shows. You can customise the timing for up to five reminders and could, for example, send reminders one day, one hour and ten minutes before an appointment.

Availability

• Custom weekly recurrence: set a custom weekly recurrence to make your appointment schedule repeat when it’s most convenient for you, such as bi-weekly. You can also choose to have your schedule repeated weekly or not at all.
• Booking notice: set the minimum (1 hour) or maximum (365 days) advanced notice required for bookings. This allows control over preparation time and accommodates last-minute bookings, if desired. You can also untick the maximum time option to let people book appointments as far ahead as they’d like.
• Daily booking limits: limit the number of appointments that can be booked per day, helping you manage your workload and free up time for other important tasks.
• Scheduling window: set start and end dates for your appointment schedule, giving a clear view of your availability and preventing people from requesting appointments outside of your booking window.
• Adjust availability: change a specific date’s availability to differ from your usual schedule, such as for out-of-office or holiday periods. This avoids unexpected bookings when you’re unavailable.
• Buffer time: add a buffer between appointments to give yourself time to complete tasks from the previous appointment or prepare for the next. 💡 Tip: 25-minute appointments with 5-minute buffers will create appointments every 30 minutes with preparation time in between.
• Consolidate calendar availability: combine and check availability from multiple Google Calendars to better set your schedule. This is useful for managing separate work and personal calendars, ensuring you only offer bookable slots for when you are truly free.
• Create a schedule on a secondary calendar: manage and receive appointments on a secondary calendar instead of your primary one. This can be beneficial for teams or departments with shared schedules to facilitate better coordination.

Booking page

• Title and description: add a title and description to the booking page, letting attendees know what to expect or bring to the appointment.
• Customise the information you collect: whilst the first and last name and email address are required in the appointment booking form, you can also include custom fields like phone number, the topic that the guest wants to discuss or anything else that is relevant to the appointment.

When should I consider setting up an appointment schedule?