How much notice should clients give when booking an appointment?
Choose booking notice around preparation and travel, set Minimum notice in Desk, and check your public page without closing more time than you need.
Desk Team
4 min read
Set the minimum notice to the time you need between receiving a new booking and being ready for the appointment. If you need to travel, prepare equipment, or review a client's information, a free slot ten minutes from now may be too soon.
In Desk, Business Settings → Online booking → Minimum notice blocks new online bookings within a set number of hours before the appointment starts. Off means zero hours. Choose the setting around your work, then check what clients can actually book through your public link.
Choose notice around the work you do before a visit
Start with what has to happen after a booking arrives. Do you need to pack supplies? Drive to the client? Read their request before deciding what to bring? Count the time those tasks require, including a realistic allowance for delays.
These examples show how to reason about a setting. They are not industry recommendations or results from Desk customers.
| Example situation | What to consider before choosing notice |
|---|---|
| You are already at your station and ready for the next client | A short notice period may fit if you can reliably see new bookings and prepare in time |
| You travel to appointments | Include packing, travel, and enough time to notice the new booking |
| You need to prepare materials for a specific service | Allow time to review the request and have the materials ready |
| You only review tomorrow's schedule once a day | Check whether a rolling hours-based limit fits that routine; it is not a fixed daily booking deadline |
For example, a two-hour preparation requirement suggests looking for a notice setting that covers those two hours. It does not establish that two hours is right for every salon, tutor, or cleaner.
A longer notice period also removes nearby appointments from online booking, even when you could serve that client. Choose enough time to do the work, and review the setting if clients repeatedly cannot find times you could reasonably offer.
Separate booking notice from the other scheduling rules
Booking notice measures the time from a new booking to the start of the appointment. Several other rules answer different questions:
- Time between appointments leaves room for cleanup, notes, or travel after one visit and before the next.
- Working hours and breaks define when you work.
- A maximum advance booking window limits how far into the future someone can book, where your scheduling system supports that setting.
- A cancellation deadline concerns changing an appointment that already exists.
Minimum notice does not add cleanup time after each appointment. If two visits are back to back, requiring both clients to book in advance does not create a gap between them.
This distinction also appears in the official Setmore booking-policy guide and Acuity scheduling-limit guide. Their controls describe those products; they do not establish which additional settings Desk offers.
Set Minimum notice in Desk
Use the Desk mobile app for this setup.
- Open Business Settings → Online booking.
- Open Minimum notice and choose an available value that covers the time you need. Off means zero; it removes this notice requirement.
- Return to the settings and check that your chosen value is shown.
- Use Copy link, then paste the URL into a browser to open your business's public booking page.
Auto-confirm bookings is a separate control. It decides whether online bookings are accepted automatically. Check it separately rather than treating approval and preparation time as the same choice.
The setup above follows Desk's online-booking documentation. Check the values available in your app instead of assuming that another booking tool's limits or per-service options also apply here.
Check a slot inside the notice window and one outside it
Check the public page before sharing the link. Select a service and use slots that would otherwise fit your working hours, appointment duration, staff availability, and required equipment.
Here is a planning example, not a live app test. Suppose it is 10:00 and the notice requirement is two hours:
| Appointment start | Time from now | Expected effect of the notice rule |
|---|---|---|
| 11:00 | One hour | Inside the notice window, so it should be blocked for a new online booking |
| 13:00 | Three hours | Outside the notice window; it may be bookable if the other availability rules allow it |
Use times comfortably inside and outside the limit for your first check. Exact behavior at the cutoff is not documented here.
You can inspect available times without submitting an appointment or entering a client's information. Note the current time and the notice value, then compare what the page offers.
If the later slot is missing too, check working hours and breaks, the service's duration, staff availability, and any required equipment. A missing time does not, by itself, identify which rule blocked it.
If a slot inside the notice window still appears bookable, recheck the selected business and saved setting. Resolve the difference before relying on the rule.
Tell clients what to do when they need an earlier time
If you accept occasional short-notice appointments, give clients a contact route you actually monitor. For example: “If you need an earlier appointment, contact us to check availability.” Use this only if you are willing to review those requests; it is not a promise of an available slot.
Review your notice setting when travel, preparation, or the way you monitor bookings changes. Once the public page offers times you can deliver, follow our guide to placing your booking link on Instagram and Google.