What is availability?

This article gives a brief introduction to the concept of availability on Timekit

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Written by derrick mak
Updated over a week ago

In Timekit terms, availability decides when a resource can receive bookings and when it's unavailable. 

Depending on what kind of booking experience you're building chances are your resources may all have different availability requirements. Because of this Timekit comes with a toolset that will help you to configure and manage each resource's availability.

Availability as a concept

Timekit operates on the assumption that a resource is available 24/7 per default. This means that you don't add availability to a resource, availability is something you remove by setting filters, like opening hours, if you wouldn't like your resources to be available for bookings around the clock.

Availability in Timekit's Admin Dashboard

A resource's availability inside Timekit's admin dashboard is unique to each project the resource is added to. Furthermore, each resource itself has it's own availability. This means that if no availability is set, the resource will be bookable any time of day. If the we apply availability to the project, then this availability will determine when the resource can be booked. Lastly, if we apply availability constraints on the resource as well, then the resource will only be bookable so long as both availability filters are allow it.

Example - Advisor booking
You have a team of advisors (resources) who handles incoming bookings from customers during weekdays from 9 a.m to 4 p.m. One of the advisor's is also a senior advisor and host a senior advisor service for VIP customers weekdays from 8 a.m to 8 p.m. 

These configurations about the advisors availability will need to be applied in two specific projects. one availability configuration for VIP customers that includes the senior's advisors availability for these customers and another availability configuration for regular customers that will include all advisors.

Availability and calendar integrations

When you create a resource you can choose to let it's availability sync with either Google or Microsoft as external calendar provider. 

Syncing a resource's availability on Timekit with an external calendar provider mean that added or removed appointments in a synced Google or Microsoft calendar will affect the resources availability in real-time on Timekit. 

Read more:

Availability through Timekit's API

Working with availability through Timekit's API is built on the same general availability concept that exists across the whole Timekit platform. That said there are some important differences between working with availability through the API and inside the admin dashboard.  

Since we have such a versatile and powerful API, we have decided to dedicate an entire section of our help center solely for the Timekit API. If this sounds like your approach, please don't hesitate to jump over to our API help center to learn more about availability through the API.

Note: Working with the Timekit API, configurations of availability is not collected in projects that can be managed via the Timekit Admin or API.


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