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 Business › Employees, listed with their branches, email, login and status.

1. Open Booked › Business › EmployeesActive and inactive staff are both listed, sorted by first name.
2. Click Add employeeThe editor opens on General: First name, Last name, Email, Phone, Status and Bio.
3. Press Save employeeOne button writes every tab: details, hours, breaks, time off, links and login.

• 1The five tabs — one form. Switching tabs saves nothing; the back arrow and Cancel discard the lot.
• 2First name and Last name — the asterisk misleads: the record saves with either one filled.
• 3Status — only Active staff are considered for availability. Inactive removes them from the booking form at once, but leaves them in the admin lists.
• 4Bio — the small grey line under their name on the booking form. There is no photo; customers see their initials in a circle.
• 5Save employee — sits at the top and bottom. Nothing is written until you press it.

Where they work, and what they can perform

Two tabs make a person bookable. Locations holds Works at; Services holds Can perform. Both are chip lists: click to toggle. The same links appear on a branch's Employees tab and a service's Staff tab, so edit whichever is quicker.

• 1Locations and Services — a person needs both links to produce a single bookable time.
• 2The chips — highlighted means selected. Inactive branches and services appear here too, so read the names.
• 3Saving replaces the whole list — Save employee 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 Times tab holds three sections: Working hours, Breaks (lunch, etc.) and Time off & 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.

• 1The weekly grid — one row per day, Monday first. 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, etc.) — a block repeating inside the working hours. New breaks start as Mon–Fri 13:00–14:00.
• 4Time off & special days — a date range that overrides the working hours. Off (time off) removes the person from every slot on those dates, at every branch.

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 follow your WordPress site timezone (WordPress › Settings › General). The Timezone box in Booked's Localisation settings does not move anyone's hours, so set both the same.

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 special day 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. Use a special day in Custom hours mode 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 Calendar staff column 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 stop customers, not your team — the admin slot picker does not grey breaks out, so a colleague can book someone into their lunch.

Give them a login (optional)

The Login tab starts as a single switch: Create a login so this staff member can sign in to manage their own calendar. Turn it on and a Username and Password appear; saving creates a WordPress user account with the Employee role. Both boxes are required, the username must be free, and the email on the General tab must not belong to another WordPress user.

Be deliberate: the login is created once, on save, and the tab is read-only afterwards. Changing the username, resetting the password or removing the login all happen under WordPress › Users, and deleting the staff member leaves the account behind. The Password box is an ordinary text field, so the password is readable on screen as you type it. One caveat: the Employee role lacks the permission the Booked menu needs, so a staff login does not yet open any Booked screen.

Why a new person shows no times

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.