I use Amelia to allow our clients to book themselves in for consultations with us at a date and time of their choosing, which is incredibly helpful. For these services the client chooses their own time slot of an hour.
However we also want to offer bookings at fixed time, so Morning - 09:00-13:00 and afternoon - 14:00 - 17:00 or all day 09:00 - 18:00 for clients to be able to book onto.
I have tried to do this and set the service duration to 4 hours but it gives them a range of option:-
09:00 - 13:00,
09:30 - 13:30
10:00 - 14:00
10:30 - 14:30 etc.
I want the times to be fixed and they book onto am or pm session only and have no other options. Is this possible to achieve? In that they can choose the date they want and am or pm or all the day but we set the times for those and there is no variation of time for the person booking? I cannot see how to do this.
I had tried this actually whilst waiting for a reply and this solution does work for those specific services. However it then prevents my customers from being able to book in between 13:00-14:00 on the other 17 services I am offering and it also prevents my offering any "all day" option. I also noticed when trying this that if I set those working hours in relation to one service I then see that all other time variations outside of this are greyed out when trying to set different times for other services. So it seems to fail for 3 separate reasons there.
Whilst waiting for an answer I have been experimenting a great deal as this is fundamental to my business and so I will admit I was hoping for a better solution, but the only way that I can see to make this work is a rather messy and complicated workaround which requires me to set up a whole load of fake employees, then set those fake employees fake times specific to each service.
So I have:-
1. My real employees on their real working hours on 75% of our services;
2. I then set up a series of fake employees for Am sessions, PM sessions, and all day sessions;
3. I link each of those fake employee's to a specific service so that customers see the option of am, pm or all day on any specific date;
4. I have to link each of those fake employees to our main calendar to prevent double booking of my employees;
5. I then have to manually assign a real employee outside of Amelia to cover the service provided by a fake employee who doesn't actually exist; and finally
6. I have to manually align my employees leave, holidays, sickness, special days, bank holidays and different shift pattern to each of those fake employees so my customers see true availabilty of my team.
I must be missing something or over complicating this right? Otherwise this means that i can only ever offer a service that aligns to all my other services.
The only way other than this I have found, unless you can help me further, is to use Amelia in conjunction with another appt booking app. I'm testing one called Bookerly now and it seems to do this and also allow the bookings in the way Amelia doesn't.
So is there something I am missing here? If I want to have one service allowing customers to book themselves onto hourly sessions from 9am - 5pm I can't also have a service which offers customer to book onto a session that only runs 9am - 12pm without having fake employers and all the problems that entails in aligning things? I can't offer a service that runs between set times that I choose in Amelia unless all my other services and all all my employees also align to those timings?
If so this is disappointing as this means I cannot use Amelia going forwards :(
Sorry for the delayed response, we don't work on weekends.
That's correct: Services in Amelia adjust to the Employee's working hours. For fixed time slots, we have Events. So, probably, if you don't want to use these workarounds, Events can be a solution.
Otherwise, I'm afraid, there's no other way to set the schedule according to your requirements.
Hi,
I use Amelia to allow our clients to book themselves in for consultations with us at a date and time of their choosing, which is incredibly helpful. For these services the client chooses their own time slot of an hour.
However we also want to offer bookings at fixed time, so Morning - 09:00-13:00 and afternoon - 14:00 - 17:00 or all day 09:00 - 18:00 for clients to be able to book onto.
I have tried to do this and set the service duration to 4 hours but it gives them a range of option:-
09:00 - 13:00,
09:30 - 13:30
10:00 - 14:00
10:30 - 14:30 etc.
I want the times to be fixed and they book onto am or pm session only and have no other options. Is this possible to achieve? In that they can choose the date they want and am or pm or all the day but we set the times for those and there is no variation of time for the person booking? I cannot see how to do this.
Thank you for your help
Robin
Hi, Robin!
Thank you for choosing Amelia.
I believe that can be achieved with the following settings:
1. You should divide Employee's Working hours into periods 09.00-13.00 and 14.00-17.00 and assign corresponding Services to them, for example:
2. After that, please enable the "Use service duration for booking a time slot" option in Amelia -> General settings.
That should work the way you require.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Thank you Lisa for looking at this.
I had tried this actually whilst waiting for a reply and this solution does work for those specific services. However it then prevents my customers from being able to book in between 13:00-14:00 on the other 17 services I am offering and it also prevents my offering any "all day" option. I also noticed when trying this that if I set those working hours in relation to one service I then see that all other time variations outside of this are greyed out when trying to set different times for other services. So it seems to fail for 3 separate reasons there.
Whilst waiting for an answer I have been experimenting a great deal as this is fundamental to my business and so I will admit I was hoping for a better solution, but the only way that I can see to make this work is a rather messy and complicated workaround which requires me to set up a whole load of fake employees, then set those fake employees fake times specific to each service.
So I have:-
1. My real employees on their real working hours on 75% of our services;
2. I then set up a series of fake employees for Am sessions, PM sessions, and all day sessions;
3. I link each of those fake employee's to a specific service so that customers see the option of am, pm or all day on any specific date;
4. I have to link each of those fake employees to our main calendar to prevent double booking of my employees;
5. I then have to manually assign a real employee outside of Amelia to cover the service provided by a fake employee who doesn't actually exist; and finally
6. I have to manually align my employees leave, holidays, sickness, special days, bank holidays and different shift pattern to each of those fake employees so my customers see true availabilty of my team.
I must be missing something or over complicating this right? Otherwise this means that i can only ever offer a service that aligns to all my other services.
The only way other than this I have found, unless you can help me further, is to use Amelia in conjunction with another appt booking app. I'm testing one called Bookerly now and it seems to do this and also allow the bookings in the way Amelia doesn't.
So is there something I am missing here? If I want to have one service allowing customers to book themselves onto hourly sessions from 9am - 5pm I can't also have a service which offers customer to book onto a session that only runs 9am - 12pm without having fake employers and all the problems that entails in aligning things? I can't offer a service that runs between set times that I choose in Amelia unless all my other services and all all my employees also align to those timings?
If so this is disappointing as this means I cannot use Amelia going forwards :(
Hi, Robin!
Sorry for the delayed response, we don't work on weekends.
That's correct: Services in Amelia adjust to the Employee's working hours. For fixed time slots, we have Events. So, probably, if you don't want to use these workarounds, Events can be a solution.
Otherwise, I'm afraid, there's no other way to set the schedule according to your requirements.
Best Regards.