Video: Setting Up Practitioner Availability

Stay with me, and let’s take a look at this together. The Availability feature in Zanda helps you differentiate practitioners’ available times from unavailable ones.

0:32 Understanding the Calendar and Availability Basics

If we look at the main calendar screen in Zanda, you’ll see that some time blocks are grayed out while others have a color. In my case, it’s white, but you can customize your calendar colors. The grayed-out color indicates when practitioners are unavailable for bookings, while the white color shows when practitioners are scheduled to work with clients.

This helps your reception team know which time blocks are available for new appointments. You can also configure availability for online bookings, allowing clients to schedule their own appointments. Let’s see how to set this up so that available time blocks are easy to identify for both your team and your clients.

1:29 Accessing and Managing Availability

First, let me show you how you or your practitioners can access availability settings. If you work in a multi-practitioner practice and have allowed practitioners to manage their own availability, they can access their Practitioner Profile. If this access is enabled, a practitioner can update their own availability settings. Here’s how it works:

They log in with their user credentials, click the Practice Business Name at the top right of the screen, and select Practitioner Profile from the menu. They then navigate to Practitioner Settings, where they’ll see the Practitioner Menu on the left. Clicking Availability opens their availability settings. Here, they can create new availability blocks or edit existing ones.

With this setup, practitioners can manage only their own availability.

If you need instructions on setting up practitioner access to their own settings, check our Knowledge Base or other video tutorials.

Master Users, Practice Managers, or other authorized users with access to Account Settings can manage availability for all practitioners in the account.

3:33 Adding and Editing Availability

If you are the sole user of your account, you can access your availability settings using the menu I’m about to show you. Click Settings to open the Settings Springboard. Then, go to the Team category and click Availability. This section displays the availability of all practitioners in your account, allowing you to manage it from here.

Let’s add new availability. I’ll walk you through the process. Click Add Availability to access the settings. First, set the Start and End Date. For example, if we want to introduce new availability for this practitioner starting next month, we can set Monday, February 3rd, as the start date. If this availability is ongoing, no end date is needed.

Next, select the Location, for example, Telehealth – if you’re introducing online services for clients. This will be a recurring availability, meaning it will repeat weekly. However, you can choose different recurrence options, such as every second week, every third week, or once a month. You can also add a Description – visible only to your team – to note why this availability was created. I’ll leave this blank for now. If you want this availability to be temporary (e.g., only for this year), you can set an End Date.

Let’s say this practitioner is available for Telehealth only three days a week instead of five. We can remove Thursday and Friday from their schedule. Additionally, if the practitioner only offers Telehealth in the mornings on Mondays, we can set availability from 9 AM to 1 PM. We can also introduce breaks by adding multiple availability blocks within a single day. For example, on Wednesdays, we can split availability into 9 AM – 12 PM and 1 PM – 5 PM to include a one-hour break.

7:19 Online Booking and After-Hours Availability

Another option is to disable online booking for specific time blocks. This means that 1 PM – 5 PM on Wednesdays will only be available for internal scheduling, allowing the reception team to book clients manually. Clients won’t see these time slots online.

You can also add availability on Sundays for urgent or after-hours services.

8:43 Cloning Availability for Multiple Practitioners

If needed, you can remove availability blocks by clicking the delete button. This flexibility allows you to fine-tune practitioner schedules as needed. Once everything is set, click Save to confirm the new availability.

Now that we’ve added Telehealth availability for one practitioner, we may need to create availability for multiple practitioners. If your practice has, say, 10 or 20 practitioners who need similar availability settings, manually repeating this process for each one would take a long time. But don’t worry – we’ve got you covered!

You can clone an availability block by clicking the Actions icon and selecting Clone. You can choose to clone availability for all practitioners or select specific ones. And just like that, the availability is cloned across multiple practitioners!

If you accidentally clone availability twice, don’t worry – you can edit or delete an availability block easily.

11:13 Using Availability Overrides

Now, let’s talk about Availability Overrides – a feature that allows you to make temporary changes to a practitioner’s availability without setting up a whole new schedule.

Click Add Availability Override, and here’s how it works. For example, let’s say a practitioner needs to be unavailable for one week in March. Select the date range and mark availability as No to block out those times. Be careful – if you select multiple days, the system will assume 24-hour unavailability unless specific times are set.

You can also set overrides per location, for example, making a practitioner unavailable for in-person appointments while still allowing Telehealth sessions. If a practitioner needs to be unavailable across all locations, you must create overrides for each one.

14:08 Best Practices and Useful Settings

Let’s now go over some best practices for managing availability. To view past availability and overrides, enable the Show Past Availability switch. This will display historical availability records.

If you want to enable online booking for specific time blocks, go into the availability settings and turn on the “Clients Can Book Online” option. Don’t forget to save changes after enabling online booking!

Another important setting to check is your account time zone. To do this, go to Settings > Practice > Business Info and select your Time Zone from the dropdown. The Time Zone setting applies to all appointments and availability in your account.

You can also color-code locations to make them visually distinct in the calendar. Go to Settings > Practice Setup > Locations, select a location, choose a color, and save it. When you return to the calendar, the selected color will be applied.

And that’s it! We’ve successfully set up availability for practitioners, customized location colors, and explored best practices.

Let me stop here – there’s much more to cover, and we have plenty of additional video tutorials. Stay with us, learn more, and enjoy using your Zanda account!