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"Appointment Start" Booking Settings Explained
"Appointment Start" is a setting IntakeQ offers to help with your appointment availability when clients schedule through your Booking Widget. In some cases, providers need a different availability throughout the work day than the duration time selected for the service.
**Note: Your services created in the booking settings also allow for similar settings to be customized per service. This means you can have each service list different slot times available based on its settings, rather than as a whole across the system.**
Navigate to: Bookings > Booking Settings > Settings Tab.
Based on session duration: This takes your starting time, and then the duration of the appointment and breaks it down based on the service duration time.
For Example: If your office hours start at 8 am and you have a 60-minute appointment duration for the service, clients can only book at 8 am, 9 am, 10 am, 11 am, 12 pm, etc. The system will see you have 60 minutes for the appointment duration, opening 1-hour slots throughout the day for this service.
**Note this follows the service duration you listed in the service itself. If other services have a different duration time, then the system will follow that. Also, be aware that blocks in the calendar will change whats available for that hour slot.**
Maximize Bookings: This setting takes all factors into account and tries to squeeze in the most appointments possible. Factors taken into account include:
- Previous appointments
- Time blocks on the calendar
- Intervals Between Appointments
- Advanced service setting "Block Practitioners for x minutes".
**NOTE: THE INTERVAL BETWEEN APPOINTMENT SETTINGS WILL NOT TAKE EFFECT UNTIL THE APPOINTMENT IS BOOKED WHEN USING MAXIMIZE BOOKINGS.**
For Example: The service with a 60-minute duration and a 15-minute interval will show open slots on the widget for 8 am, 9 am, 10 am, 11 am, 12 pm, etc. The interval selected on the service will not show the 15-minute interval option until the service is booked. For this reason, we highly suggest if you need added time to the service for a practitioner, please use the Advanced service settings option "Block practitioner Time for..XX".
Appointments start every x minutes: This option simply takes the start time and allows you to start x intervals regardless of the session duration for the service.For example: If you select the setting "Appointment start every Hour", and your office hours start at 8:30 am, then the system will show your open slots on the booking widget as 8:30 am, 9:30 am, 10:30 am, etc. Even if your session duration for the appointment is 30 minutes.
**Note: This setting takes time blocks into account on the calendar.**
For Example: If you have created a time block from 12 pm to 12:15 pm, with the "Appointment start every Hour" setting, then the system resets the hour starting at now 12:15 pm. Then continuing list the open slots as 1:15 pm, 2:15 pm, etc.
**Note: The issue mentioned above about "Intervals" applying once the appointment is booked applies here as well for this setting option.**
Custom start times: Please see our helpful article Custom Appointment Start Times - IntakeQ & PracticeQ Guides.
Each practitioner on your team has the ability to use this feature, see the following article for setting practitioner-specific booking settings: Booking Settings for Practitioners on a Team