Buffers — protecting the time around a booking

A booking takes longer than the service does. There is getting there, setting up, packing down, and getting to the next one. Buffers are how you tell your booking page about that time, so it stops offering slots you cannot physically take.

The two settings

• Buffer before — time reserved ahead of the appointment. Travel, setup, sterilising, laying out kit.
• Buffer after — time reserved once it ends. Packing down, cleaning, the drive to the next client.

Both are per-service, because a home-service booking and a studio booking do not need the same padding. A 2-hour appointment with 30 minutes before and 45 after occupies three and a quarter hours of your day, and that is what the calendar reserves.

Buffers versus the gap between offered times

These are different settings and it is worth being clear about which one you actually want.

• Buffers block time around a booking that exists. Nothing is reserved until someone books.
• Slot interval controls how often a start time is offered at all — every 15, 30 or 60 minutes. This applies whether or not anything is booked.

If your page is offering more start times than you want to think about, that is the slot interval. If someone booked you at 10am and then booked again at noon across the city, that is buffers.

Choosing a number

Be honest rather than optimistic. The cost of a buffer that is too long is a few slots you might have sold; the cost of one that is too short is arriving late to a client who is getting married. In a city where a twenty-minute drive is sometimes fifty, most vendors under-set these at first and raise them after the first bad Saturday.

If you only ever work from one place and clients come to you, you may need no buffer at all — set both to zero and the calendar packs your day tight.