## Overview Some services are not sold by the hour, they are sold by the **shift**. An upholstery-cleaning crew that arrives at 10:30 is not free again at 11:30: they take the whole morning. The customer still needs to pick an **arrival time**, but the rest of that shift has to leave the calendar the moment they book. That is what the **"The whole shift"** option does. It lives on the event type, under **What one booking takes off the calendar**: - **Only the chosen time** (default): the appointment plus its buffers. This is how Agenda has always worked, and nothing changes for event types that already exist. - **The whole shift**: booking any time reserves the **entire availability range** it falls in. Book 10:30 inside 08:00–12:00 and the whole morning disappears from the public page — only the afternoon shift stays for sale. > **The shift IS the availability range.** There is no separate "shift" field: Agenda uses the ranges > you already configure under **Availability**. A day with two shifts is a day with **two ranges > separated by a gap**. ## Prerequisites - **Agenda** module enabled and an **event type** created. - The day's **availability** split into separate ranges — that is what defines the shifts. - A role allowed to edit event types. ## Step by step 1. Open **Availability** (on the calendar or on the event type itself) and split each day into the shifts you work. The classic shape: - `08:00 – 12:00` (morning) - `14:00 – 18:00` (afternoon) Use **Add time range** to create the second one. **Leave a gap between them.** 2. Save the availability. 3. Open the **event type** and, under **What one booking takes off the calendar**, choose **The whole shift**. 4. Set the **duration** to the real length of the service (that is what the customer sees, and what reaches Google and the .ics file) and the **slot interval** to how often you want to offer arrivals: every 30 minutes, every hour… 5. Save and test on the public page: pick a morning time and confirm the whole morning is gone, with only the afternoon left. ## Settings & options - **What one booking takes off the calendar**: *Only the chosen time* or *The whole shift*. - **Duration**: the real length of the service. It does not have to match the shift — the customer sees this duration, and it is what lands on their calendar. - **Slot interval** (under **Agenda settings → Scheduling defaults**): how often arrivals are offered inside the shift. - **Buffers**: with shift occupancy they protect the **edges of the shift** — the buffer before pushes its start, the buffer after extends its end. - **Availability**: each day's ranges. **They are what define the shifts.** ## Use cases - Upholstery cleaning: arrival between 08:00 and 10:00, but the crew stays all morning. - Removals and freight: one job per shift, two a day. - On-site technical installation: the customer picks "morning" and the technician sets the route order. - Renting a space by period: morning, afternoon, or both. ## Tips, limits & best practices - **Leave a gap between shifts.** Two ranges that touch (12:00–14:00 right after 08:00–12:00) are merged into **one** 08:00–14:00 range, and then a booking takes both. The lunch break is not just a pause: it is what separates one shift from the next. - **A shift that runs past midnight works.** A range cannot cross midnight, so a 22:00–02:00 shift is written across two days: Monday `22:00–24:00` and Tuesday `00:00–02:00`. Because they touch at midnight they count as **one shift** — a 23:00 booking takes the small hours with it, and a customer can pick a start whose appointment ends after midnight. - **A day with a single range is one shift.** If the day is only `08:00–18:00`, one booking takes the whole day. That may be exactly what you want (one job a day) — it just has to be deliberate. - Any appointment inside the shift kills it, not only bookings from the public page: an event created directly in the agenda or imported from Google at 09:00 also takes the morning off sale. - **Rescheduling inside the same shift is allowed** — the shift is already the customer's, so moving from 10:30 to 11:00 works normally. - On the dashboard grid the booking shows at its real time, with the reserved shift drawn as a **faded band behind it**. It is not a second appointment: it is the same booking, rendered. - **On Google:** the technician gets the appointment at its real time (10:30–11:30), not the whole shift. The shift reservation lives in Conversa Labs Agenda — anyone booking straight into Google needs to check Agenda too. ## Troubleshooting - **I booked one time and the whole day disappeared**: the day probably has a single range, or two ranges that touch. Open Availability and separate the shifts with a gap. - **The afternoon went away with the morning**: the two ranges are back to back (e.g. 08:00–12:00 and 12:00–18:00) and were merged. Leave a real gap between them. - **The page offers no times at all**: the duration may be longer than the shift. A 4-hour service does not fit in a 3-hour range. - **Only one time per shift shows up**: raise the **slot interval** — it is what decides how many arrivals are offered inside the shift. - **The customer says their appointment is wrong on their calendar**: it is not. Their invite is the real time they picked; the whole-shift reservation is internal, which is why it is not in the invite. ## See also - [Event types, availability and buffers](/hc/ajuda/articles/calendar-scheduling-tipos-de-evento-disponibilidade-buffers-en) - [Account scheduling defaults and inheritance](/hc/ajuda/articles/calendar-scheduling-padroes-de-agendamento-da-conta-en) - [Cascading availability: account, calendar and event type](/hc/ajuda/articles/calendar-scheduling-disponibilidade-em-cascata-en) - [Prevent overlapping appointments](/hc/ajuda/articles/calendar-scheduling-impedir-compromissos-sobrepostos-en)