Service areas, staff hours, and how bookable slots are built

Doorstep decides which appointment times to offer a customer by combining a few things you set up: where you work and on which days, when your staff work, and how much breathing room you want between jobs. When a customer picks a service and enters their ZIP code, Doorstep works out every open slot and shows only those.

This guide explains the pieces and how they fit together, so the times customers see match the times you actually want to work.

The pieces that build a slot

Four things decide whether a given time is offered to a customer:

1. Service areas — the ZIP codes you cover, and the days of the week you cover them.
2. Staff hours — when each staff member works.
3. Time already booked — existing appointments and any time off.
4. Your scheduling settings — the gap you keep between jobs, how far ahead customers can book, and how much notice you need.

Doorstep starts from your staff hours, keeps only the days you serve the customer’s ZIP code, removes anything already booked, adds your buffer around each job, and offers what’s left. If a service takes 90 minutes, only openings at least 90 minutes long are offered.

Service areas: where and when you work

A service area is a name, a set of ZIP codes, and the weekdays you serve them. For example, a “North side” area might cover a handful of ZIP codes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Service areas do two jobs at once:

• They decide who can book you. If a customer’s ZIP code isn’t in any of your areas, they can’t book at all.
• They decide which days count for that ZIP code. A customer in a Tuesday/Thursday area will only ever see Tuesday and Thursday slots, even if your staff work every day.

You can create as many areas as you need, each with its own days. If you have staff who only cover certain areas, an area can be limited to specific people, so customers in that area only get booked with the right staff.

Staff hours: when you work

Each staff member has working hours for each day of the week. Doorstep only offers times inside those hours. Time off blocks out specific dates, and existing appointments are automatically removed from what’s available, so the same slot is never offered twice.

If you’re a team of one, your own hours are all Doorstep needs. As you add staff, Doorstep looks at everyone’s hours together and offers whichever staff member is free.

Scheduling settings: the fine-tuning

A few account-wide settings shape the final list of slots:

• Buffer — extra time kept before and after each appointment, for travel or cleanup. A 30-minute buffer means Doorstep won’t book two jobs back to back.
• Minimum notice — how far in advance a customer must book. Set this so nobody books you for 20 minutes from now.
• How far ahead — the furthest into the future a customer can book.
• Slot spacing — whether start times land on the hour, the half hour, and so on.

Common gotchas

A few setups quietly result in “no times available.” If a customer says they can’t find a slot, check these first:

• No area covers that weekday. This is the most common one. If none of your service areas include, say, Friday, then nobody gets Friday slots, no matter what your staff hours say. Add the weekday to a service area to open those days up.
• The customer’s ZIP isn’t in any area. If their ZIP code isn’t listed anywhere, they can’t book. Add it to the right area.
• No staff work that day. Even if an area covers Friday, someone has to be working. Check that a staff member has Friday hours.
• Buffer or notice is set high. A long buffer or a large minimum-notice setting can hide slots you expected to see. If your calendar looks emptier than it should, these are worth a look.
• Time off or a full calendar. Days that are booked solid or marked as time off simply won’t show openings.

Where to go next

• Set up your account to add your first service areas and staff hours in the wizard.
• Connect Stripe and set deposits to protect those bookable slots from no-shows.