How to set staff working hours and availability

Your booking page is only as accurate as your team’s hours. If those are wrong, customers either get offered slots nobody can work — or never see the openings you actually have. This guide shows you how to set working hours, breaks and time off in Opraly so availability is always real, and you stop fielding “are you actually open then?” messages.

Before you start

Have each staff member’s regular weekly schedule handy, plus any standing breaks (lunch, school run) and known time off. If you run more than one location, know who works where. That is all the setup needs.

These hours work hand in hand with your service durations and buffers — Opraly combines the two to calculate which slots can actually be offered.

Step 1: Set regular weekly hours

Open Staff, pick a person, and set their working hours for each day of the week. A few principles:

Set hours per day, so a part-time Tuesday and a full Saturday are both honest.
Mark days off as closed, not “0 hours” — it reads cleaner on the calendar.
If two people share a chair or room, give each their real hours; Opraly will not double-book the same resource.

Step 2: Add breaks

Block out recurring breaks — lunch, admin time, a standing appointment — so the booking page skips them automatically. Breaks are protected: customers cannot book over them, and they show on your day/week/month calendar so you always see why a gap is there.

Step 3: Handle time off and holidays

For one-off absences — a holiday, a course, a sick day — add time off for that staff member. Their slots disappear for that range and reappear afterward, with no need to touch your regular hours. For business-wide closures (a public holiday), close the whole location for the day so nobody can book any provider.

Tip: Add known time off as soon as you book it, not the week before. Future-you avoids the awkward call to a customer who grabbed a slot you cannot work.

Step 4: Assign staff to the right location and services

Availability is the intersection of three things: hours, services, and location. Confirm each person is:

Assigned to the location(s) they actually work at.
Ticked for the services they perform (see adding services).

Now “any available” matching and specific-provider booking both stay correct, and a cross-town slot never shows up by accident.

Step 5: Review on the calendar

Open the day or week view and look at the team side by side. You should see each person’s hours, breaks and bookings at a glance. Two quick checks:

Does everyone’s shaded “available” band match reality?
Are breaks and time off in the right places?

When something changes on the fly, drag-to-reschedule moves a booking to another time or provider in seconds, and the customer can be notified automatically.

Step 6: Set roles and permissions

Decide who can change whose schedule. With staff roles and permissions, a front-desk lead might manage everyone’s hours while individual providers only see and edit their own. This keeps a busy team from stepping on each other’s calendars.

Quick reference

Scenario	Where to set it	Effect
Regular shifts	Weekly working hours	Defines bookable slots
Lunch / admin	Breaks	Protected, recurring gaps
Holiday / sick day	Time off	Slots removed for a date range
Public holiday	Location closed	No provider bookable
Last-minute move	Drag-to-reschedule	Instant change + notify

Common pitfalls

Forgetting buffers. Hours say you are free, but back-to-back with no buffer still runs you late. Set both.
Leaving stale time off in place. Old blocks quietly hide real availability — clear them once they pass.
Mismatched location assignment. A provider with the wrong location shows wrong slots; double-check after any move.

Per-industry notes

Salons and barbers — pair hours with the walk-in queue so booked and walk-in customers share one honest calendar. See /industries/beauty.
Clinics — align provider hours with room availability at /industries/health.
Classes — set instructor availability around the class timetable at /industries/classes.
Rides — driver shifts feed dispatch and the walk-in / stand queue at /industries/rides.

Handling change without chaos

Real schedules move. Opraly is built so a change in one place ripples correctly everywhere:

Someone calls in sick — add a same-day time-off block and their slots vanish; existing customers can be notified and rescheduled.
A provider extends their hours for a busy week — bump the working hours for those days only, and new slots appear instantly.
You need to shuffle a booking — drag it on the day or week view to another time or provider, and the customer gets a reschedule notice.
You add a new location — assign the right staff and hours, and only that site’s real slots show on its booking page.

Because availability is calculated, not hand-maintained, you are never patching the same information in two places.

A quick weekly habit

Spend two minutes each week on availability and you avoid almost every scheduling headache:

Glance at the week view to confirm everyone’s hours look right.
Add any time off you have learned about since last week.
Clear out stale blocks that have already passed.
Check that new staff are assigned to the correct services and location.

It is a small ritual that keeps your booking page trustworthy.

Accurate hours are quiet but powerful — they prevent the double-books and no-availability gaps that erode trust before a customer even arrives. Set them once, keep time off current, and the calendar stays honest.

Start free and get your team’s real availability online.