This article explains how to set and adjust business hours in your system to align booking options with your operational schedule. By configuring these settings, you can ensure that bookings align with your work periods, prevent scheduling errors outside designated hours, and optimize overall resource utilization. Customers will benefit from a more efficient booking process that matches their service availability.
Business hours represent the working hours of your organization. You can set the system to allow bookings only during these hours.
Apart from business hours, there are also workdays, which serve the same purpose as business hours, albeit on a daily (not hourly) scale.
Set up business hours for the whole organization
Go to Settings > Calendar > Business Hours. Here, you'll see checkboxes next to each day. The ones that are enabled represent the organization's workdays.
Beneath the workdays are the fields for the business hours. The left field represents the start of the workday, and the right field represents the end.
To specify the hours, click one of the fields, and a drop-down menu will appear, allowing you to select the desired times.
The working hours you choose are also used when using full-day or half-day resource rates or passes. If the total working hours in a day are 9 hours, for example, a half-day pass will be used when a member has checked in for less than 4 hours and a half, and any booking for 4 hours and a half will use the half-day price of its Resource Rate.
Set up business hours per location
You can also set business hours per location. To do this:
Go to Space > Locations and click an existing location (or create a new one).
Open the Business Hours tab.
Select Set Location-Specific Business Hours.
Set the working days and business hours for the location.
Click Update.
By default, any new location you create will have its business hours set to match the ones you set in Settings > Calendar > Business Hours. However, if you have multiple locations with different business hours, you can specify them individually for each location here.
Note: The business hours set for each location take precedence over the general ones.
What about outside business hours?
Outside business hours is considered any period of time outside the workdays and business hours.
To prevent members from booking meeting rooms outside business hours:
Go to Settings > Calendar > Business Hours.
Select Business hours bookings.
Select to which members this should apply: active, non-active, or both.
Click Update.
Note: These restrictions only extend to members. If necessary, admins can make bookings outside business hours on the calendar on the Admin Portal.
How exactly do business hours affect the booking calendar?
Depending on the business hours you've set in the organization settings, the booking calendar will appear differently in the Member Portal. If you open the daily view of the calendar, only the working hours are visible.
However, if bookings aren't forbidden outside business hours, your members will still be able to make bookings outside the hours visible on the calendar.
Timezone Change Impact on Booking Display
When a location or organization changes time zones after bookings have been created or imported, the bookings will retain the time zone in which they were initially created.
This means:
When the location's time zone changes, existing bookings don't automatically adjust to the new time zone.
Instead, they are displayed in their original timeslot, based on the old timezone.
This creates a visual mismatch on the calendar, where the booking appears at the wrong time relative to other bookings that follow the new timezone.
The result can be apparent overlaps in bookings, even when they don't actually conflict in real time.
With that in mind, please refrain from changing the time zone in your organization after the initial setup.