Scheduling and availability
The AI never guesses at your schedule. Every time it offers is computed from your real availability: your hours, your existing jobs, your time blocks, and how long the requested job actually takes.
What makes a slot available
Section titled “What makes a slot available”A time is offerable when all of these hold:
- It falls inside your business hours for that day of the week.
- It isn’t covered by a time block you’ve placed on the calendar.
- It has enough contiguous free time for the requested service’s duration — a 30-minute gap will not be offered for a two-hour job.
- It doesn’t collide with an existing appointment, including a slot on hold for someone’s deposit.
- It isn’t already busy on your Google Calendar, if you’ve connected one.
Slots are offered on 30-minute boundaries by default. A cancelled appointment — or one you mark as a no-show — frees its slot again immediately.
Business hours
Section titled “Business hours”Set per day of week in Settings → Business Profile, along with your timezone. Different hours on Saturday, closed Sunday, a short Friday — all supported. The AI treats these as hard limits for normal booking.
Time blocks
Section titled “Time blocks”Block time on the Calendar screen to take it off the board without creating a fake appointment: vacations, a supplier run, a standing Thursday morning you keep for paperwork. Blocked time never gets offered.
You can also block time by voice — call your own number and say “block Friday afternoon”. See Owner assistant.
Job durations
Section titled “Job durations”Each service in your service catalog carries a duration. That duration is what the availability engine reserves, so the calendar reflects reality instead of uniform hour-long boxes. A job booked without a catalog service falls back to a standard one-hour slot.
Zones and zone days
Section titled “Zones and zone days”Zone scheduling stops you driving back and forth across your service area.
- You define zones in Settings → Business Profile as groups of zip codes, each with a name and a color.
- A caller’s address maps to a zone — the AI reads the zip out of the address it collected, or asks for it.
- When the AI offers times, it prefers days you’re already working that zone.
A zone day is “yours” for two different reasons, and both count:
- Regular route days you set on the zone — “Tuesdays are the north side”.
- Days that already have a job in that zone, whether or not they’re a regular route day. The first booking on a new day pulls the rest of that zone’s callers toward it.
Set the zone day policy to enforce and the AI offers nothing else for that zone; leave it on prefer and other days stay bookable, just not suggested first. Enforce is strict enough that a zone with no route days and no bookings has nothing to offer, so set the route days before you switch it on.
Booked appointments show their zone as a colored chip in the Appointments list and on the Calendar, so a glance tells you whether tomorrow is one trip or four.
Zone scheduling is off by default; enable it once you have zones defined. Zones never refuse a job — that’s what the service area is for.
Google Calendar sync
Section titled “Google Calendar sync”StrandCalls has its own calendar and does not require Google. Connecting Google Calendar in Settings → Integrations (OAuth) makes the sync work both ways:
- StrandCalls writes each booking into the calendar you already check.
- StrandCalls reads that calendar’s busy time when it computes availability, so a dentist appointment you put in Google is not offered to a caller.
That second half is the one people don’t expect, and it’s the reason connecting Google is worth doing even if you never look at the StrandCalls calendar: the schedule you already keep starts protecting itself.
If Google can’t be reached at the moment of a call, StrandCalls books on its own data rather than failing the call — so a rare Google outage can produce a double-booking against a Google-only event. It won’t produce a lost customer.
Connecting it also ticks the “Calendar connected” item on the setup checklist. If you don’t use Google Calendar, you can safely leave that item unchecked — booking works either way.
Appointment reminders
Section titled “Appointment reminders”When reminders are enabled, StrandCalls calls the customer the day before their appointment with a spoken reminder:
This is a reminder from [your business] about your appointment tomorrow at [time]. Press 1 to confirm, or press 2 to reschedule.
Pressing 2 hands the caller to the AI, which rebooks them live against your real availability — you don’t get pulled into it. Each appointment is reminded once, roughly a day ahead, and when texting is on the call is backed up by a text they can reply CONFIRM or RESCHEDULE to. Cancelled jobs and no-shows are skipped.
Recurring series
Section titled “Recurring series”For route trades, Recurring turns a customer into a repeating series — same service, same cadence — rather than a booking you have to recreate every time. Combine it with a hard zone-day policy and your route builds itself.
A series carries the customer, the service, the address, the visit time, and any prep notes (gate code, pets). Cadence is one of five:
| Frequency | Repeats |
|---|---|
| Weekly | every 7 days |
| Every two weeks | every 14 days |
| Every four weeks | every 28 days |
| Quarterly | every 91 days |
| Twice a year | every 182 days |
Visits are written onto the calendar about four weeks ahead and topped up as time passes, so the schedule you’re looking at is real bookings rather than a rule you have to interpret. Each visit behaves like any other appointment — reminders, zone chips, deposits, cancellation.
The customer can manage their own series by phoning you: the AI can tell them when their next visit is, skip the next one, pause the series (with or without a resume date), move it to a different day, or cancel it — and a cancellation is confirmed twice before it happens. Anything you’d rather they didn’t do by phone, do yourself in Recurring.
The day before each visit, customers with a series get a short prep text so the gate is unlocked and the dog is in. Series need the Growth plan to create, but visits already scheduled keep materializing if you move back to the flat plan.