Minimize Gaps in Appointments

[MALqueerhair]

Squarespace offers a Minimize Gaps setting that when enabled, the booking flow only suggests available appointment slots that fit the selected service duration near an already scheduled appointment so that any "gaps" are closer to EOD

Their Tooling allows you to select from one of 2 options:

- Avoid any gaps between appointments during the day

- Avoid small gaps but allow gaps of at least [hour drop-down] (ex. 2 hours)

Because Square Appointments does not have a comparable Minimize Gaps feature, we've had to open up another day so instead of working 4 days, we now have to work 5 days!

This is because clients can book anytime during the day causing gaps that no service can fit eating into our daily availability & costing us money.

You will save service providers MONEY & TIME if you release this functionality!

[MALqueerhair]

If you find this annoying too, please comment an example of how many hours were wasted in a day due to unschedule-able gaps!

I'll go first - Today we lost 2 hours (at least $120 in lost revenue) across several 15-30 min gaps that don't fit a full service.

[Bareaestheticsb]

Yes! Sometimes I’ll even have a client book the last spot and my first appointment is like 2-3 hours before. Ive had to use the reduce availability feature to kind of compensate but i hate it! Im really considering switching booking programs

[hmm2022]

My staff would prefer appointments closer together and I want them to be happy. 

[Innerglo]

Im generally pleased with squares automated placement of appointments.  We have service time ranges from 20 min to 3 hours and it plays tetris pretty good.  

HOWEVER - Ive had to really learn the system to make it behave like I need.  You need to make it easy for the system to play tetris with appointments. 

This means:

All services end on intervals that fit together.  So you cant have 15 35 40 85 minute services.  You need all 15 minute intervals or 20 or 30, but you cant mix and match. It does some retarded stuff otherwise.... 

NEXT - Your lunch - Your lunch literally dictates how the system behaves if its the first thing on for the day.  So for an example we time our lunches to be automatically placed at an interval time of 3x our most common service from start of day. So if we open at 8:30 - that lunch is at 1PM cause our most common service is 90 minutes.  

I would argue that lunch placement is the SINGLE most important event of the day.  It will start planning events around the lunch, start of day and end of day first. 

[Kassi_]

Hey there, @MALqueerhair - 

Appreciate you getting the conversation going about your Feature Request! I see other sellers have added their voices to this one too. 

At the moment, this isn't on the roadmap for the Appointments platform. Keep up the good work with getting other sellers involved with your feature request to show our Product Team it is still popular among our sellers. 

Once more information becomes available from them, a Moderator will come back to update the status to keep you in know. 

[Hunterrochelle]

This would be so helpful if they added a minimize gaps feature!! Sometimes i'll have a later appointment in the day (4pm) and someone will go on and book a 9am appointment which leaves me with a crazy gap, if no one else books something in between. 

[gaby725]

I offer some services that don’t take long, so it would be nice to be able to use short time increments to avoid any huge gaps.

[MALqueerhair]

I still think this feature is needed - even more so with the amazing new automated Beta wishlist feature!

This will save appointment service providers time & money and have more consistent books with less weird openings that don't fit any services.

[balancedlife]

This feature is absolutely needed. I have my booking set to "according to appointment duration" and it hasn't made a difference. I have an appointment scheduled at 1pm one day and instead of the system showing an hour(with added 15 minute in between) available at 11:45, it showed 11. A customer booked that,  so now I have a 45 minute gap where I can't schedule anything. Now instead of showing a 90 minute massage available at 9:15, the only availability is 8:30, which would leave me with another 45 minute gap. 

It amazes me that despite this topic being brought up in the forums over several years, Square doesn't see the need for this feature. It would save so many people so much of our valuable time.

[TWCS]

This would be amazing. There is zero intuitiveness to the booking even though the technology is out there. I would be willing to pay extra to have this feature because in the end it will actually make me more money.