Set buffers, minimum notice, and how far ahead clients can book

They live in one place. Open Availability in the sidebar, under the Configure group. Your weekly hours fill the left of that page; the panel on the right holds the Scheduling Defaults card, under the line "These apply to all event types unless overridden individually."

CalsoScheduling Defaults on the Availability page

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What the three settings do

Minimum notice is the one most worth setting on day one. A new workspace has no notice at all, so a client who finds your page at 8:52 AM can take a 9:00 AM slot. Enter the minutes you need: 120 for two hours, 720 for twelve, 1440 for a full day. It is measured from the moment the client is looking at the page, not from midnight, so a time reappears in the list as soon as it is far enough away.

Maximum advance keeps someone from booking you fourteen months out. At the default of 60 days, your booking page shows the next two months and nothing beyond; months entirely past the cut-off come up empty.

Set your defaults

1. Open the Availability page

   Click Availability in the sidebar, in the Configure group, and find the Scheduling Defaults card in the panel on the right.

2. Enter a buffer

   Type the minutes you want held after each session into Buffer time — the field steps in fives, so 5, 10, 15, and 30 are a click away. Leave it at 0 if you genuinely run back to back.

3. Enter your minimum notice

   Type the minutes of warning you need into Minimum notice. The field steps in fifteens, so hold the arrow down to reach 120 or 1440, or just type the number.

4. Set how far ahead the page looks

   Type a number of days into Maximum advance. The lowest it accepts is 1, so this is not the place to close bookings off entirely — make an event type inactive instead if you need to stop taking bookings for it.

5. Save

   Press Save Defaults. The button reads "Saving..." while it works and a green Saved! appears beside it when it's done. The change applies to your booking page immediately.

Where the buffer actually falls

Buffer time is padding reserved after the session a client is booking, so an example helps. Say your hours run 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, the session is 60 minutes, the buffer is 15 minutes, and you already have something on a connected calendar from 2:00 to 3:00 PM.

• The last time offered before that commitment is 12:45 PM. It ends at 1:45 PM, leaving the buffer clear before 2:00.
• 1:00 PM is not offered, because a session starting then would end at 2:00 with no gap at all.
• 3:00 PM is offered. The buffer sits behind a new booking, not in front of it, so a client can take a start time the moment your earlier commitment ends.

So the practical effect is a guaranteed gap before whatever comes next, and no guaranteed gap after whatever came last. If you need breathing room on both sides, the simplest fix is to make the session length itself a little longer than the time you spend with the client.

For the buffer to respect commitments made outside Calso, the calendar holding them has to be connected — see connect your calendar.

How start times land on the 15-minute grid

Calso builds start times by stepping forward in 15-minute increments from the beginning of each availability window, and it does this the same way no matter how long the session is or what buffer you have set. A 45-minute session on hours that open at 9:00 AM offers 9:00, 9:15, 9:30, 9:45, 10:00 — not 9:00, 9:45, 10:30. All of those overlapping options are real, and the ones that collide with a booking vanish the instant it is taken.

Two things follow. Buffers and notice never move the grid; they only remove times from it. And the tidiness of your day comes from where your windows start, not from your session length.

If you would rather clients cluster around the sessions you already have instead of scattering across the grid, Smart Scheduling does exactly that, on the same page.

When one event type needs its own rules

Everything above is your workspace-wide starting point. Any single event type can carry its own numbers on its Availability tab, in the Scheduling Rules panel, under "Override workspace defaults for this event type." That panel offers the same Buffer time and Maximum advance, plus a second notice field — Minimum notice (hours) — that replaces the minutes value whenever it is above 0 rather than adding to it.

The Event Types list makes this easy to audit: a card shows a small strip like "15m buffer", "120m notice", or "30d advance" wherever that event type is running on its own rules rather than yours.

Ready to give one offering its own hours as well as its own rules? Read give one event type its own hours and scheduling rules.