Sometimes trying to be on the bleeding edge (or just ahead) often means trying to get things done quickly, which can result in breaking things in new and creative ways. Some people never admit their mistakes, I’m humble enough to not only admit them, but to share them so other people pulling their hair out as to why their booking site isn’t working can learn from my mistakes. Especially when they’re kinda funny.
I was trying to set up Microsoft Bookings for a group of individuals, and no matter what I did, I just could not actually get it to work. The backend was all there – staff is there, availability is there, and I can even manually book a slot from the admin portal, but the customer portal just stays on “loading” for all staff and offered no availability.
It was me…I goofed it up, and an easy goof at that 😉
Under the service settings, there is a setting called “Buffer Time”. That allows you to specify how long of a gap to set between each booked slot, so the staff can complete paperwork, get coffee, etc. I wanted to default it to 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after.
In my infinite wisdom, I actually put the “15” in the hours box in the after area, as such, there would never be availability as 15 hours is longer than the user’s daily availability. Once I changed it to be 15 minutes after, the bookings site worked as expected.
Anyway, onto bigger and better screw ups!