Zenbooker gives you two main ways to control how availability for time slots is determined:
Based on service provider availability (default)
Manual job limits
You can set your preferred approach in Settings > Scheduling Policies.
If you're using service territories, each territory can have its own scheduling policy.
How duration affects availability
When determining which time slots are available, Zenbooker calculates how much time is needed for the job using:
The base duration of the selected service
Plus any extra time added by selected service modifiers
This total duration is used to block off the necessary time on the calendar—both when showing available time slots to the customer and then later when creating the job on the schedule.
Based on service provider availability (default)
Zenbooker checks your team’s real-time availability to determine which time slots can be booked. Here's how it works:
Let’s say you have two providers available at 8:00 AM on Tuesday.
A customer books a job at 8:00 AM.
Until it’s assigned to at least one provider, the time slot remains available.
Once assigned, Zenbooker updates provider availability based on the job’s duration.
If both providers are assigned, that slot is fully blocked.
If the service requires multiple providers or providers with specific skill tags, only time slots where the job requirements are met will be shown.
You can also enable auto-assign for a service. When booked, Zenbooker automatically assigns the job to an available provider who meets the skill, location, and availability criteria.
When territories are enabled, only providers assigned to the selected territory are considered.
When using Based on service provider availability, make sure the workers performing services are added to your Zenbooker account as Service Providers, and that their available hours are accurate. Zenbooker uses this information to determine how many providers are available at any given time.
Manual availability
If you don't want Zenbooker to take into account the availability of your service providers, or you don't feel like adding all of your workers and their hours to Zenbooker, you can set your Scheduling Policy to Manual, which simply lets you set the max number of jobs that can concurrently take place before a time slot should become unavailable.
For example, if you allow up to 2 concurrent jobs, your schedule for Monday day looks like this:
A 2-hour job is scheduled at 8:00 AM
Another 2-hour job is scheduled at 9:00 AM
And if, say, a customer then wants to schedule a 1 hour service, Zenbooker will show:
8:00 AM – available (1 job overlaps)
9:00 AM – unavailable (2 jobs overlap)
10:00 AM – available (1 job overlaps)
Just like with provider-based availability, job duration is calculated from the service and any selected modifiers.