Clinics often notice that the online scheduler offers start times that don't match the duration of their services. For example, your appointments last 20 or 30 minutes, but patients see times every 10 minutes. This article explains what you are looking at and what influences it.
The times you see are start times, not durations
Every time shown in the scheduler is a possible start of an appointment. The length of the appointment is always the duration you configured for that service.
If a patient books a 30-minute service at 12:10, the appointment is created in your calendar as 12:10 to 12:40. Seeing times 10 minutes apart does not mean 10-minute appointments are being booked.
How the system decides which start times to show
The scheduler does not use a fixed interval. It calculates availability based on the following:
The durations used in your account. This includes the durations of your bookable services, the default and specific appointment durations set for your treatment categories, and the durations of existing appointments in the calendar.
Connecting to existing appointments. The system prioritizes start and end times that connect directly to appointments that are already booked. This keeps the calendar compact and avoids unusable gaps. As a result, a gap that looks free at first glance may not be offered right away. Once the connecting slots are taken, later times become available as well.
Patterns it recognises over time. The system also takes the practitioner into account and the typical length of the appointments they perform.
Why you may see steps of 10 or 15 minutes
The more your durations differ from each other, the finer the grid of start times becomes.
An example. A clinic offers a consultation of 20 minutes, a consultation plus treatment of 30 minutes, a treatment of 20 minutes and a follow-up of 20 minutes. To be able to fit both 20 and 30 minutes against each other without leaving unusable gaps, the system offers start times in steps of 10 minutes. That is the smallest step that works for every service in the list.
If you mix durations that have no clear relation to each other, for example 10, 15, 20 and 25 minutes, the system cannot recognise a pattern and the result becomes even less predictable.
Please note: the interval between the offered start times is not a setting. It is calculated by the system and cannot be fixed to, for example, every half hour.
What you can do
Keep one consistent family of durations. For example 15, 30 and 45 minutes, or 20, 40 and 60 minutes. Avoid using durations from different families next to each other.
Check your appointment defaults as well. Even when you work with bookable services, the default appointment duration and any specific appointment durations set per treatment category are still taken into account. A short duration left there, for example 5 or 10 minutes, makes the grid finer. See Setup Guide: Appointment Defaults.
Check the durations of your bookable services. See Setup Guide: Online Scheduling Bookable Services.
Check existing appointments in the calendar (up to 6 months back)
Give a new account time. If you have just started with online scheduling, there is little history in the calendar for the system to work with. The offered times generally become more compact as your calendar fills up.