What is the relationship between cleanup time and intervals?
The short answer is: there is no direct relationship.
Cleanup time allows you time between appointments to clean up and collect payment. You can add cleanup time by following these steps.
Intervals are the times we show as available to your clients when they book online. This setting is found under Setup > Scheduling Settings. So rather than a client being able to choose absolutely any time of the day, you can make it so they can only choose an appointment time every 30 or 60 minutes for example.
An example of cleanup time & intervals
Imagine you have an appointment that is 60 minutes long with 30 minutes of cleanup time (a total of 90 minutes). You have also selected to display available time slots in 60 minute intervals. Let's see how that will work, starting with a day that you from from 9am to 5pm and that day has no appointments scheduled yet:
- When booking online, the first client will see 9:00am, 10:00am, 11:00am etc as times they can choose from
- Let's say they pick 9:00am. This means the appointment will go from 9:00am to 10:00am, but since there is 30 minutes of cleanup time we'll block off until 10:30am
- The next client to book online will be offered the following times 10:30am, 11:30am, 12:30pm. So this is still an appointment option every 60 minutes, but starting from the end of the previous appointment rather than from the start of your work day
Intervals only apply to online scheduling. When you are scheduling an appointment yourself, you have the freedom of scheduling the appointment at any time you like.