Managing Calendar with Internal Availability

Your team can now use the Internal Availability feature in Lightning Step calendar to streamline staff scheduling by offering three key benefits: 

1. Easily view calendar availability set by other staff members
2. Improved management of internal staff schedules
3. System alerts when attempting to schedule appointments outside of a staff member's available hours, services, and/or locations

Get started with Internal Availability 

This feature is available for all staff members in your accounts, and can be accessed by going into Calendar > Settings > Edit Availability Hours:  

Staff members can easily enable the Internal Availability feature by creating an availability slot in the “Edit Availability Hours” page.  

This can be done in one of two ways:  

• Creating a Recurring availability slot  

• Creating a Custom availability slot  

Staff members can create multiple availability slots, each with specific parameters. For recurring slots, users must specify: 

• Days of the week 

• Time frame (start and end times) 

Optional settings: 

• Assign to multiple locations & services to indicate which services will be offered for that slot.  

• Date range for the recurring slot (if not specified, the slot will repeat indefinitely) 

Custom availability slots take precedence over recurring availability on the same day, providing flexible schedule management. This allows staff members to make temporary adjustments to their schedule without modifying their recurring availability settings. For example, if you need to change your hours for a specific Thursday, you can create a custom availability slot that will override your regular recurring Thursday schedule just for that date. 

Additionally, users can filter the Custom Availability page by date, to easily find availability slots they are looking for: 

Internal Availability display in the calendar 

Once a staff member has created availability slots, those slots will display in the calendar with a white background. All other time slots automatically display with a gray background, indicating periods when the staff member is not available.  Other staff members can see these white and gray shadings when viewing that person's calendar, making it easy to identify available times when scheduling appointments. This visual availability display can be viewed in three calendar views in Lightning Step: 

• Week view 

• Day view 

• Staff view  

Internal Availability display in calendar Week view.

Internal Availability display in calendar Day View 

Internal Availability display in calendar Staff View 

Internal booking alerts 

When scheduling appointments outside a staff member's set availability, the system will display alert messages in the appointment details modal if: 

• The time falls outside of their available hours 

• The service isn't included in their availability settings 

• The location isn't assigned to their availability slot 

While these alerts serve as warnings, the system will still allow you to save appointments that don't match the staff member's availability settings. This flexibility ensures you can handle exceptional circumstances when needed:

Staff members have full control over their use of Internal Availability. Those who prefer not to share their availability can simply refrain from creating availability slots. This won't affect their calendar view—they won't see any white or gray shading on their own calendar. However, they'll still be able to see the availability of other staff members (displayed as white/gray shading) who have created availability slots.