User guide
This guide covers day-to-day use for providers and schedulers: services, availability, the booking page, and managing bookings. For company-wide settings, see the admin guide.
Services
Section titled “Services”A service is something customers can book. Create and edit services under Services. Each service has:
- A name, description, and duration. You can offer more than one duration on the same service.
- A location: in person, a phone call the provider makes, a phone number the attendee provides, a plain link, a Jitsi meeting, or a Google Meet link when Google Calendar is connected.
- One or more assigned providers.
- Optional intake questions that the customer answers when booking.
- Scheduling rules: buffers before and after, minimum notice, and the interval between offered slots.
- Optional confirmation step, so a booking stays pending until a provider accepts it.
- A daily cap, so a service accepts only so many bookings per calendar day.
- Group seats, so several people can share one slot for group sessions. Leave this at one for one-on-one bookings.
Services can be hidden or left as drafts while you set them up, and you can order them on the public page.
Providers and assignment
Section titled “Providers and assignment”Every service has at least one assigned provider. When a customer books:
- They can choose a specific provider, or leave it on “any available”.
- When it is left open, Tidetime assigns the least-busy available provider, measured by upcoming bookings. Exactly one provider is assigned per booking.
This keeps work spread across the team without anyone managing a rota by hand.
Availability
Section titled “Availability”Set working hours under Availability. Availability is built from schedules:
- Each provider can have one or more named schedules, such as “Working hours” or “Evening clinic”, and a default schedule.
- A schedule has weekly rules (for example Monday to Friday, 9 to 5) and can include date-specific overrides.
- Owners and admins can manage other providers’ availability. Providers manage their own.
A time is offered to customers only when the provider is available, the slot is inside the service rules, and there is no conflict on a connected calendar.
The booking page
Section titled “The booking page”The public booking page lives at /book/<company-slug>. It lists your bookable services. Choosing one opens the booking flow: pick a provider or leave it open, choose a date and time in your own time zone, answer any questions, and confirm.
If a service requires confirmation, the customer sees that the booking is pending until a provider accepts it.
Managing bookings
Section titled “Managing bookings”Open Bookings in the dashboard to see upcoming, pending, past, and cancelled bookings. From here you can:
- Confirm or reject bookings that require confirmation.
- Reschedule or cancel a booking. The customer is emailed and the calendar invite is updated.
- Open a booking to see its details and its activity timeline.
The dashboard Calendar shows bookings in a week or day view. You can drag on the calendar to create a manual booking or drag an existing one to reschedule it.
Attendee responses and calendar files
Section titled “Attendee responses and calendar files”Confirmation emails include Accept, Decline, and Tentative links so attendees can respond, and an .ics calendar file so the booking drops straight into their calendar app. Updates and cancellations carry a version number so Outlook and Apple Calendar keep the entry in sync.
Customers
Section titled “Customers”Everyone who books is recorded under Customers, de-duplicated by email. Each customer has a history of their bookings, and you can export the directory to CSV. If a customer asks to be removed, you can delete their record.