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Time Off & Unavailability

A provider's availability says when they can be booked. Real life needs the opposite too: a vacation week, a dentist appointment on Thursday, a conference, a clinic-wide holiday. Unavailability is how you block that time so no one — staff or client — can book into it, without dismantling the provider's normal schedule and rebuilding it afterwards.

The distinction is worth holding onto: availability is the recurring pattern, unavailability is the exception laid on top of it.

Block time for one person​

Open the provider's schedule and add a time-off block covering the dates or hours they're away. From the moment it's saved, those slots stop being offered anywhere — the staff calendar, the client app, and every public booking page — so a client can't book a time the provider won't be there.

Their normal availability is untouched. When the block ends, their usual hours resume by themselves; there's nothing to restore.

note

Blocking time doesn't cancel appointments already on the calendar for those hours. Existing bookings stay put so you can decide deliberately what to do with each one — move it, reassign it, or contact the client.

Close the whole clinic​

For a public holiday or a day the practice is closed, block the time for each affected provider. Everyone's booking surfaces go quiet for that period, and clients trying to book see the next genuinely available time instead.

For a closure that applies to everyone, add it under Settings → Holidays instead. A holiday removes those hours from every provider's bookable time — at one location or across the organization — so clients are not offered them, and it appears on the schedule as a grey band carrying the closure's name in the Day, Week, Team and Month views, so staff see that the organization is closed before they try to book rather than finding out from a conflict message.

tip

Add recurring closures — holidays, a standing admin morning — as soon as you know them. Clients booking weeks ahead then never see a time you'd have to take back.

warning

Blocking time that already has appointments in it is the moment to deal with those bookings. Nothing auto-cancels, and a client whose appointment sits inside a time-off block will still show up expecting to be seen.

See who's out​

Time-off blocks appear on the calendar alongside appointments, so the day view shows both what's booked and who's unavailable. Every block records who created it, which keeps a clear trail when a schedule question comes up later.

Ask Atlas

Ask Atlas "who's off next week?" or "block Tuesday afternoon for Dr. Chen" — it can both answer from and stage changes to the schedule, showing you the change before anything is saved.

Next steps​