A slot vanished, or got double-booked

Why an available time can disappear, and how two bookings can land together.

A time that was there this morning and has gone this afternoon almost always has an ordinary explanation. Booked rebuilds the list of bookable times from scratch every time somebody asks for it. Here is what goes into that calculation — and how two appointments can still land on top of each other.

How a bookable time is worked out

For one service, branch, member of staff and date, Booked layers everything you have set up and offers what survives. The branch has to be open, that person has to be working, and the whole block — one service length for every person on the booking, plus any buffer after — has to fit inside one continuous stretch of open time, clear of any booking or break.

• 1Opening hours — Business › Locations › Times. With no hours for that weekday, Booked returns nothing without even looking at your staff.
• 2Working hours — Business › Employees › Times. They are cut down by the branch hours, not added to them, so Priya’s 08:30 start is never bookable. If they never overlap, she produces nothing even though both records look open.
• 3What is left — the overlap, with her 10:00 appointment and her 13:00 lunch break cut out. A break blocks time exactly like a booking.
• 4The offered times — stepped by your Time slot interval, 15 minutes by default. 09:45 has gone as well as 10:00, because a 15‑minute appointment plus a 5‑minute buffer started at 09:45 runs to 10:05 and lands on the 10:00 appointment. 15:45 has gone because the same block would have to stay clear until 16:05, and Priya finishes at 16:00.

The whole block must fit inside one unbroken interval, so an appointment can never straddle a lunchtime close or run past closing. Buffer after (min) counts towards that block, which is why it shortens the end of the day. Buffer before (min) is saved but plays no part in availability — put turnaround time in Buffer after.

Bookings that hold a slot without looking like it

Every appointment for that person on that date blocks its time except one marked Cancelled — the only status that frees a slot. Pending bookings hold their time while they wait for approval, and so do Completed and No-show ones. Bookings block the person, not the branch: Priya booked at 10:00 at Bramhall is unavailable at 10:00 at every branch she works at.

• 1The Pending chip — the quickest way to see what is holding time you thought was free.
• 2No-show still holds 11:30 — nobody turned up, but the appointment is still on the books, so the time stays blocked. Set it to Cancelled to free it.
• 3A week-old Pending booking — the classic. The customer started a booking that needed a deposit and closed the browser at the card step. The appointment had already been saved, so it still sits on 11:15, and nothing clears it automatically.

Changes of your own that take times away

Special days have one surprising habit: only one applies to a given date — the earliest-starting match — and an overlapping second one is ignored, so a "Christmas closed" range and a "reduced hours" range will not combine. Choosing Custom hours also starts with every weekday switched off, which means closed.

How two bookings land on the same time

Customer bookings are checked hard. Bookings made in the admin are not.

• 1The Bookings tab — Settings uses a vertical rail, and Booking rules is the first card on this tab, above Deposits.
• 2Allow staff to override availability — off by default. Turn it on and taken times become clickable in the admin picker, while a closed day offers a fixed 08:00–20:00 window that cannot be changed.
• 3Time slot interval — the step between start times, and the snap size when dragging in Quick edit. If your duration is not a multiple of it, dead gaps appear between appointments.

Even with override off, the admin picker has blind spots: it does not subtract staff breaks, so 13:00 is offered while Priya is at lunch; it ignores a service's Availability window, so Tuesday-only flu jabs appear on a Wednesday; and if you pick a branch but no member of staff, every open time reads as free.

On the Calendar, dragging in Quick edit shows green for free and red for a clash — but red only asks "Move it anyway?", and clicking through saves the move regardless. That check ignores breaks too, and an unassigned appointment always reads as free.

What protects a customer booking

When a customer confirms, Booked re-checks that exact slot before writing anything: the availability window, that the member of staff is linked to the service and branch and is Active, that the time has not passed, and that the whole appointment fits with nothing overlapping. If any of it fails they see "Sorry, that time was just taken. Please pick another slot."

That re-check is why "any available staff" can land on someone other than the person the browser named — the assignment is resolved again on submission. It always picks the alphabetically-first free person by first name, so one member of staff fills up first.

What to do when it happens

1. Filter Bookings to PendingCancel anything old sitting on the missing time and it comes straight back.
2. Open that date in Calendar, Day viewChoose the branch and the person in the filters. Closed hours and breaks are only shaded once you pick something specific — left on All locations and All employees, the day looks open around the clock.
3. Look for a special day or a day offThe Day off button undoes only single-date closures it created, not a multi-day holiday set in the employee editor.
4. Compare the two sets of hoursThey are intersected, not merged. An interval whose end is not after its start — an overnight 22:00–02:00 — is stored but ignored, with no warning, so it produces no times at all. Split it into 22:00–23:59 and 00:00–02:00 on the following day.
5. Free a time you need backSet the status to Cancelled and save: the slot frees immediately, and the customer gets the Booking cancelled message unless you have switched that template off in Customisation › Notifications. Deleting frees the time too, but tells them nothing.

If today looks wrong, check the timezone. Booked’s own Settings › Region & currency stores a Timezone, but availability reads the WordPress site timezone instead — the one in the WordPress admin under Settings › General. If the two disagree, the cut-off that hides past times can be an hour out. Set both the same.