Let me explain my clients setup.

They provide an at home service.  The client wants to be the one that assigns the employee given other details and not have a customer select a specific employee.   

My hope was that I could create a generic employee that was the default employee for a given service.  Then a customer could make an appointment and they'd be set as pending.  The client would then go through and assign it to an employee when they confirmed the appointment.  For the most part this works ok.  Only issue is that if another person requests the same time slot then that other persons email gets attached to the previous appointment as opposed to there being two different appointments that then need to be handed out to employees.

I could obviously make the default state be 'confirmed' to avoid having the second email address added to the existing appointment but then prior to office staff assigning the appointment to another employee (away from the default one) no other customers could request that time slot.

Do you have any recommended workflows to handle this situation?

I can provide a bit more clarity.

When I did that initial test I only had one employee entered and their capacity at 5.  I was testing to see if that meant it would allow me to make multiple appointments at the same time.  Instead of that it just added the other 'test customers' to the existing appointment (which I now understand why).

Once I added a second employee (both with capacity of 1) then after each had an appointment during the time it would block any further appointments.  I do understand this functionality.

What I guess I really want to know, is if there is any way to have the appointment process not include a dropdown for employee (I just want all new appointments to initially go to a generic 'staff' employee that I create).  The client would then make the employee to appointment assignment.  Given the skills of the different employees they need to manually match up an employee to a specific customer based on their needs and that really can't be automated.

The best workaround I could figure was to have two locations, one called 'New Appointment' with this generic staff member as the ONLY employee and then a second actual location with the full employee list.  Then I'd use the shortcode for that 'New Appointment' location for the step by step wizard on the font end.  So all appointments would come in to the 'New Appointment' location and then a staff member could assign it to an actual employee with the following process.

1) clear out the location assignment for the new appointment (otherwise it limits employee options)

2) apply the appointment to the desired employee (who was actually defined under a different location)

There are two main downsides to this approach that probably can't be overcame.

1) until the staff member re-assigns the 'New Appointment' location appointment to an actual employee that time slot in the wizard will show as taken and nobody else can make an appointment at the same time.  That is unless there is some trick to allow multiple appointments for the same user.

2) Once all the employees are busy during a given time slot there is no way to have that time slot show as unavailable on the step by step wizard (short of making a dummy appointment for the generic user under the 'New Appointment' location).

So two questions:

1) any way to allow multiple appointments to be made for the same employee on the at the same time?

2) any other recommendations for how I might approach this workflow?

Oh one other question.  Why is there no 'Location' filter on the Appointments tab in the admin interface?

I guess as one work around to the issue about not being able to take more then one appointment request at any given time until they associated the appointment with an actual employee (per my workflow idea below) would be that I can create a couple 'generic' employees under that 'New Appointment' location.