Add staff and their hours

Who works where, when they work, and which services they perform.

A staff record answers four questions: who this person is, which branches they work at, which services they perform, and when they are available. Get all four right and their times appear on your booking form. Miss one and they never appear.

Add the person

Staff live under Staff in the Set up group, listed with where they work, what they can do, their hours, what is coming up for them, their login and status.

1. Open Booked › StaffActive and inactive staff are both listed. The search box matches name, email, phone, role and branch, and the buttons beside it narrow the list to who is In today, Off today or Inactive.
2. Click Add staffThe editor opens on Profile: who they are (first name, last name, a role or line about them), how to reach them (email, phone) and status. If your plan has no room for another member of staff, the button is greyed out.
3. Press Add staff memberOne button writes every tab: details, hours, breaks, time off and both tick lists. On an existing person it reads Save changes, and Save in the header does the same. Saving takes you back to the Staff list.

• 1The five tabs — one form. Switching tabs saves nothing; the back arrow and Cancel discard the lot.
• 2First name and Last name — a name is the only thing Booked insists on, and either half will do; save with neither and it asks you to “Give them a name first.” Customers see the full name, or the first name alone if the booking form’s Staff names setting is First only.
• 3Status — only staff who are Active and bookable are considered for availability. Switch it off and they leave the booking form at once, but stay in the admin lists.
• 4Role, or a line about them — the small grey line under their name on the booking form. There is no photo; customers see their initials in a circle.
• 5Save — in the header, with Add staff member (later Save changes) at the foot. Nothing is written until you press one of them.

Where they work, and what they can perform

Two tabs make a person bookable. Works at lists your branches; Services lists what they Can perform. Both are tick lists. The same links appear on a branch’s Staff tab and a service’s Staff tab, so edit whichever is quicker.

• 1Works at and Services — a person needs both links to produce a single bookable time. Select all and Clear sit above each list.
• 2The tick cards — ticked means selected. Inactive branches and services appear here too, tagged Inactive.
• 3Saving replaces the whole list — Save changes writes both lists over what was there, so if a colleague changed them while your editor was open, your save undoes it.

Set their working hours

The Hours & time off tab holds three cards: Working hours, Breaks and Time off and special days. Working hours are what make someone bookable at all — a new staff member has none, so they are closed every day. Turning a day on creates a 09:00–17:00 interval; + Add interval adds a second for a split shift.

• 1Working hours — one row per day, Monday first, each with a toggle. Tuesday’s two intervals give Priya 08:00–13:00 and 14:00–18:00. Thursday reads Closed.
• 2Apply to all days — copies that day’s intervals onto all seven, weekends included, over whatever was there. Use it first, then fix the days that differ.
• 3Breaks — lunch and other regular breaks, blocking time inside the working hours: pick the weekdays, the times, and what it is.
• 4Time off and special days — a date range that wins over the weekly hours. Off removes the person from every slot on those dates, at every branch; Different hours swaps in a pattern for that spell.

How staff hours sit inside branch opening hours

Working hours never widen a branch's opening hours — they narrow them. Booked takes the overlap of the two, then cuts out breaks and existing bookings. Time off comes earlier still: on the dates it covers it replaces the weekly hours outright.

If a person's hours and the branch's hours never overlap, that person produces nothing there even though both records look open. And a booking blocks the person, not the branch — someone booked at 10:00 at High Street is unavailable at 10:00 at Bramhall too.

There is one weekly pattern per person, applied at every branch they work at — no per-branch rota. If someone does Mondays at one shop and Tuesdays at another, both days stay open at both shops; use separate staff records to keep them apart.

Hours are read on your site’s clock: Booked works times out in WordPress’s own time zone (WordPress Settings › General). Keep the Time zone under Settings › Region & currency set to the same place; Booked warns you there if the two disagree.

Breaks, time off and days off

A break repeats weekly and blocks part of a day; time off closes whole dates. Add a break creates the first, Add time off the second. Up to eight breaks are kept per person, and a break is dropped on save if no weekday is ticked, or if its end time is not later than its start.

• Half days — there is no half-day option. Add time off set to Different hours and shorten that weekday.
• Overlapping holidays — one special day applies per date and the earliest start wins; the other is ignored without warning.
• Bank holidays — special days do not repeat annually; enter them again each year.
• A single day — the Day off button on a Diary staff column, in Day view, closes one date and shows up here afterwards. Working reopens only that exact one-day closure, so a day inside a longer holiday must be edited here.
• Breaks hold for your team too — in the admin slot picker a break shows in amber, and Booked refuses to save a booking over it unless Let staff override availability is on under Settings › Booking rules. More in Breaks, holidays and time off.

Give them a login (optional)

The Login tab gives a member of staff their own sign-in and decides what they can see. Save the person first: on a new record the tab only says “Save this person first.” Then reopen them, and under 1 · How they get in choose Email them a link (they set their own password, and nobody else ever sees it) or Set a password now (at least eight characters, for somebody standing next to you). Booked creates the WordPress account and puts them on the team. Once they can sign in, the same tab offers Email a password reset link, Set a password now and Remove their login; removing it keeps their staff record, hours and bookings.

What they can see and change is set on the same tab, exactly as under Team — it is the same record and the same activity log. Start from a preset (Front desk, Practitioner, Manager, Marketing or Full access), then adjust any screen to No access, View or Edit, and choose how much of it: Only their own appointments, and which branches. For a new login the button reads Send the invitation or Create their login; after that, Save access. Someone who can sign in but has no access set sees nothing until you give them something to do.

Why a new person shows no times

The Staff list drops a few hints — No hours set, Nowhere yet, No services — but nothing warns you when a combination produces zero slots. Work down this list.

Finally, Any available assigns the first free person alphabetically by first name, so one person fills up before the rest of the team.

Related: Give your team their own logins.