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

A time is offerable when all of these hold:

1. It falls inside your business hours for that day of the week.
2. It isn’t covered by a time block you’ve placed on the calendar.
3. 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.
4. It doesn’t collide with an existing appointment.

Slots are offered on 30-minute boundaries by default.

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

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

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

Zone scheduling stops you driving back and forth across your service area.

• You define zones as groups of zip codes, each with a name and a color.
• A caller’s address maps to a zone.
• When the AI offers times, it prefers days you’re already working that zone. Set a zone’s day policy to enforce it strictly and the AI will only offer that zone’s route days.

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.

Google Calendar sync

StrandCalls has its own calendar and does not require Google. Connecting Google Calendar in Settings → Integrations (OAuth) mirrors StrandCalls appointments into a calendar you already check.

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

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.

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.

Related

• Services & prices — durations come from here
• Messaging — confirmations and the 7am briefing
• Deposits — holding a slot until payment clears