Online appointment availability in PracSuite is affected by all of the following:

You can specify the minimum and maximum search range for online bookings by going to Settings > Online Booking > Online Booking Overview.

For example, you may not want patients booking within an hour of the current time and not beyond 3 months.

The easiest way to control when patients are able to book online is by using Rosters. For a detailed guide on setting up a Roster please click here.

The practitioner's Roster is the first level that informs PracSuite if time in the appointment book is available for online appointments.

For each day that a Roster is active, between the start and end times, the Roster Availability dictates whether Online Appointments are available via the checkbox pictured below.

For details on how to manage online booking availability for practitioners with multiple appointment book columns, please click here.

For example, a Roster with no rules that has Monday 9 am - 5 pm set as the start and end times with the Online Appointments option ticked will allow patients to book in any time during these hours.

Adding Rules to rosters allows you to manipulate the available times further by indicating times within the day's start and end times that are either available or unavailable for Online Appointments.

This is indicated by the final three tick-boxes; M (Manual appointments), O (Online appointments) and W (Waiting list).

Using the Add Rule button, you can create a rule that represents a lunch break (for example) where you may allow manual appointments for emergencies, but don't want these times to be available for patients to book in themselves, online. Untick the O (Online appointments) box and leave the M (Manual appointments) ticked.

Please note that the opposite will also work. Depending on how you set up your Roster, you could have the general Roster Availability set to Online Appointments off and then create rules that make specific time available for Online Appointments.

You can also use the Roster rules to create space in the Appointment Book exclusively for new patients (as an example).

Select the Cog icon when customising a rule to tell PracSuite what appointment types can be booked during that timeframe.

Select one or more Appointment Types.

When you need to make time unavailable for patients to book online on a one-off basis, you can simply rule out or create a note on the appointment book and that time will be instantly unavailable when a patient next looks online.