How to set specific dates for adhoc staff on MS Bookings

Question

I have set up a service and assigned staff and this works well, however when I have other staff assisting for adhoc days of the month (no set pattern) how do I set specific dates for those extra staff helping instead of days of the week as I have to edit it each week and move appointments that are booked to others on the team

Answer 1

Hi Vicky Dunbar

Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A Forum.

Based on my testing, Microsoft Bookings does not currently provide a direct way to configure staff availability for specific individual dates (for example, enabling a staff member only on certain ad hoc dates within a month). Instead, staff availability is typically configured using recurring weekly working hours.

One workaround you may consider for handling ad hoc extra staff on specific dates without constantly moving appointments is to configure availability at the service level:

1. Open the service where the ad hoc staff will help.
2. Go to Availability options for that service.
3. Use Set availability for a different date range to define one or more specific date ranges when the service’s availability should change.
4. For each date range, choose an availability mode (for example, Bookable when staff are free or Custom hours) and ensure the ad hoc staff members are assigned to that service during those dates.
5. If there are dates where the ad hoc staff should not be bookable, you can create another date range and set the service to Not bookable or adjust the custom hours accordingly.

However, please note that this method controls the service availability rather than the availability of an individual staff member. The configured date ranges will apply to the entire service instead of a specific staff member.

If you need more flexibility for managing ad hoc staff, you may consider creating a separate service for those ad hoc staff members and controlling the service’s availability using appropriate date ranges. This approach can work well when the ad hoc staff share the same availability. If each ad hoc staff member has different availability, separate services may be required to manage those schedules independently.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to let us know if you have any further questions.

---

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.