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Does Square Appointments offer double booking?

Beta Member

Does Square Appointments offer double booking?

I'm a hairstylist and regularly 'power' or 'double' book my clients during haircolor services to maximize my schedule and earnings.  For example, I schedule my highlight & haircut service at 3 hours:  this gives me an hour to highlight, one hour for the client to process, and the last hour for the cut and blowdry.  During that hour of processing time, I schedule another client for a color and/or cut service.  Is this something that can be done with Square Appointments?  So far, it looks like if a client books me for a highlight & cut at noon, I'd be unavailible for any other bookings until 3pm...  I need to show availibity for a 1pm appt.

2 Verified Answers
Verified Answer

Re: Double Booking Appointments

Hi there @jjohnstone 👋

 

We introduced the processing time feature last year, which enables your clients to book appointments during your down time.

You can learn more about how this works here, but be sure to let me know if this isn't what you were looking for!

 

P.S. Welcome to the Seller Community!

Verified Answer

Re: Square Appointments: How do I book clients in between processing time?

Kinda tricky.

 

The service duration + the block time for the service has to be less than the processing time. It gets complicated if both services have processing time. It has to puzzle together perfectly in order to work. 

 

It could also be be the calendar settings for when times can be booked. Typically we suggest setting the processing time to  According to service duration within Appts Dashboard > Settings > Calendar & Booing > Appointments are scheduled. 

 

@Hannahchristine

162 Comments

Please add a processing time feature to appointments for hair colorists. Vagaro has this feature. Every time I've called Square, I've been told that my request will be esclated to the product team. Threads on this topic go as far back as 2016 to no avail. Thank you.

Beta Member

I agree with this post. I actually left square for Vagaro a couple months ago for this exact issue. There is a big community of hair stylists that need this feature. 

With Vagaro you get online booking, online store, emailing, gap time, item cost and average cost tracking, and better reporting all included. I understand appointments is free, but I was using it when it wasn’t. Square is missing out on a huge market. I’ve read other threads where others have asked for this to be added but will stay with their current provider until it is added. 

I did love the user friendliness of Square but you can’t keep telling everyone it’s “on the list”.

Admin

@masumi  and @tl6734

 

This request is truly great feedback. Our Product Teams juggle a lot of feature requests and they try their best to prioritize which ones to launch as quickly as possible.

 

We will continue to pass along this feedback and track this request, for sure.

Beta Member

I know you guys get a lot of requests and it is hard managing them all. I think it would be helpful to know if it’s just not on the table vs hearing that you’ll pass along the info because I think it makes everyone feel like it’ll be coming sooner than later. Thanks for the response.

If the dev team needs feedback on how the gap time works or how they can really grab the hairstylist market, I’m sure there are plenty of us that would be willing to help out. 😊

I do not understand why it has taken nearly 4 years to make double booking a function for their appointments section. Are you paired with a company that won’t allow this? The square platform COULD be an all in one SEAMLESS system for a large group of people. It is a shame that it isn’t being worked on. As a hair stylist, time is money and right now I have to go between two systems to book and take payments (very annoying) I have to record payment on the envision app I use for booking and stock management, and then turn around and take payment through square. This is becoming increasingly a time sucker, I’m thinking of leaving square because of this. 

Admin

@Rlbbeauty

 

Thanks for surfacing this issue. I do realize it's a painful situation when you want to be able to book services congruently.

 

We do have our Product Team actively working on some updates that will address this, but no ETA on when that may be. Appointments is part of the Square ecosystem, so we're not partnering with other companies to make this work. That said, this feedback goes a long way in making it the perfect fit for all types of businesses.

 

We are aware of the request and working on it! I will continue to pass this feedback to our team so that we hopefully will come to a solution for you!

Is there a way to double book appointments through the app?

Admin

@jesskdoeshair

 

I've moved your post to a thread that discusses this Feature Request in depth. We'll continue to pass this to our Appointments Product team.

Any updates on this? Love the software as a whole, but the lack of processing time/gap time in appointments is a complete pain!!

Square Community Moderator

Hi @hairbycoreyd! Welcome to the Community!

 

There should be an option in your Service Settings where you can add time after your service to block extra time off. 

 

It looks like this: 

 

 

From there, you can toggle on the > Block Extra Time feature to have time after appointments!
 

Hope this helps!