Seasonal and day-limited services

Offer something only in flu season, or only on Tuesdays.

Plenty of what a pharmacy sells is not on offer all year, or every day. Flu vaccinations run autumn to spring; ear syringing might only happen on the days your trained pharmacist is in. Booked handles both from one card on the service — a list of weekdays it can be booked on, and date ranges that come back every year on their own.

Where the window lives

Go to Booked › Business › Services, click the service, and open the Availability tab. One card, When can this be booked?, holds both restrictions. The note underneath is worth reading twice: "Restrict this service to certain days or a time of year. Leave everything open for no restriction. (This is on top of your staff and location opening hours.)" All six tabs are a single form — moving between them saves nothing, and Save service writes the lot at once.

• 1Availability — the second tab in the service editor's rail. Nothing on it is saved until you press Save service.
• 2Available on these days — seven buttons, Monday first, as everything in Booked is. Highlighted means bookable; here Sunday is switched off.
• 3The hint underneath — the only reliable way to tell whether a restriction is live. It reads "Only the highlighted days can be booked." when one is, and "All days can be booked." when there is none.
• 4One date range — a month and a day at each end, no year. The bin button removes it.
• 5Add date range — adds another row. Booked keeps up to 24 ranges per service, so a clinic running in several short bursts is fine.

Limiting a service to certain days

Switch off any day you do not run the service and the hint flips to "Only the highlighted days can be booked." Ear syringing on Tuesdays and Thursdays means highlighting those two and nothing else.

The catch is at the other end. Switching all seven back on is stored as "no restriction" rather than a list of seven days — the same thing in practice, but it means a brand-new service with no restriction also renders with every button lit. Read the hint rather than the buttons.

Setting a season that repeats every year

A date range is a month and a day at each end. There is no year anywhere, which is deliberate: the range comes back on its own every year. Set flu jabs to 1 Oct – 31 Mar once and the service reappears each October without you touching it. There is no way to set a window for one year only, so for a genuinely one-off clinic, set the service to Inactive when it is over.

A range whose start falls after its end wraps across New Year, so 01 October → 31 March behaves as you would read it. Add several ranges when the service runs in bursts — a date only has to fall inside one of them to pass.

The Day dropdown offers 1 to 31 whichever month you pick, so 31 February is accepted and behaves as the end of February. Usually that is what people meant, but 28 is clearer to whoever reads the setting next.

How a window narrows what you already offer

Availability windows only ever take time away. They cannot open a day the branch is shut or a member of staff is not working — ticking Sunday changes nothing if nobody works Sundays. Booked tests the date against the window first, before it looks at anyone's hours. If it passes, the usual layers apply: branch opening hours, then each qualified person's working hours cut down to the branch's, then bookings and breaks.

• 1The seasonal range — tested first. Every date in November sits inside 1 Oct – 31 Mar, so the whole week passes.
• 2The weekday allow-list — Sunday is not highlighted, so it returns nothing before any hours are read.
• 3Branch opening hours — Bramhall is shut on Sundays anyway. Window and branch agreeing is normal and harmless.
• 4Staff working hours — Priya is the only vaccinator on this service's Staff tab, and she works Tuesday to Thursday. Monday, Friday and Saturday go because of her rota, not the Availability tab.
• 5What is left — three days. Adding Sunday back to the allow-list would not produce one extra time, because the layers below are still closed.

What customers see out of season

On a date the service is not offered, the form has no times to show. It never explains why, and there is no "back in October" message anywhere. What customers see depends on the Date picker you chose at Customisation › Booking Form › Layout.

• 1The Sunday column — dimmed all month, because Sunday is switched off on the service. Customers are told nothing beyond "not available".
• 230 September — one day before the season opens, so dimmed too. This is the day people ring up about.
• 31 October — the season opens and normal times appear, with nobody switching anything on.

Only some layouts dim empty days like this. Calendar grid and Clinic fetch the visible month and dim what has nothing; Week shows a slot count under each of seven days; Next free looks fourteen days ahead. The default Dropdown fetches one day at a time and greys nothing out, so a customer in September clicks date after date to find the clinic has not started. If people complain about hunting for a date, switch the layout.

Every layout has a limited horizon, capped at 42 days per lookup. A season opening further ahead than that gives them nothing to look at, and Next free will say "No availability in the next two weeks. Please contact us." In August, for a service starting in October, that is expected rather than a fault.

When a service vanishes and you did not mean it to

An availability window is one of several ways a service goes quiet with no warning anywhere in the admin. Work down this list:

• Read the hint on the Availability tab. "Only the highlighted days can be booked." means a restriction is live. If a range row has gone missing since you saved, it was incomplete.
• Check today's date against your ranges. A range that wraps New Year is fine, but one typed back to front for a season that does not wrap will exclude most of the year.
• Check Status is Active on the General tab. Only active services reach the form.
• Check the Staff and Locations tabs. A service reaches the booking form only when it is Active, linked to at least one branch, and at least one active staff member is linked to both the service and that same branch — the last part is set under Employees › Locations.
• Check nobody overwrote those two lists. Saving a service replaces both outright, and the same links are editable from Employees and Locations — whoever saves last wins.