Scheduling · Setup
Appointment types & scheduling rules
An appointment type is one kind of load at one location — how long it takes, how much clearance it needs, and how far ahead a carrier has to book it. Almost everything a carrier experiences is decided here.
Open TypesHow many types should you have?
One per combination that genuinely schedules differently. If inbound full truckloads take two hours and outbound LTL takes forty minutes, those are two types. If two lanes take the same time and ask the same questions, they're one type — splitting them just gives carriers a choice that doesn't matter.
Types are scoped to a location. A second warehouse gets its own, which is what lets each site run its own durations and hours.
The basics
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name | What carriers pick from on the booking page. Make it obvious at a glance — “FTL Inbound”, “LTL Outbound Reefer”. |
| Load type | FTL or LTL. Labels and groups the appointment for your team and in analytics. |
| Direction | Inbound or outbound. Shown on the schedule and included in notifications and webhooks. |
| Duration | How long the truck occupies the dock. This is what gets blocked on the calendar. |
Set duration to the realistic door time, not the optimistic one. It is the single number that decides how many trucks fit in a day, and under-setting it books you tighter than you can actually run.
Minimum notice
The shortest lead time a carrier can book at. Anything sooner than this from right now is hidden from the booking page. Choose from no minimum up to 72 hours.
Set it to the time your team genuinely needs to prepare a load. Too long is the common mistake — 24 hours means today is never bookable, and carriers who find your page in the morning see nothing available until tomorrow.
Buffers
Buffer before and buffer after reserve clear time on either side of the appointment — for staging, paperwork, or cleanup. Carriers never see them; they just find fewer adjacent slots offered.
Buffers belong to the appointment, and each appointment carries its own type's buffers. When SimpleDock checks whether a new booking fits, it compares the new booking's buffered window against every existing booking's buffered window. Two types with 30-minute buffers therefore need a full hour of clear space between them.
How the rules combine into a slot
A time is offered to a carrier only when all of this holds:
- It falls on the grid set by the location's slots per hour
- The full duration finishes before your operating window closes — a two-hour type against 8:00–17:00 stops being bookable after 15:00
- It is at least the minimum notice away from now
- The buffered window doesn't collide with another appointment's buffered window
- The date isn't closed, and a door or capacity slot is free
Duration, notice, and buffers are per type. Slots per hour, operating hours, closed dates, doors, and capacity are per location — so changing one type doesn't affect the others, but changing the location affects them all.
Switching a type off
Deactivating a type removes it from the booking page immediately while leaving its history and its booking questions intact. Existing appointments on that type are unaffected — they keep their times and still appear on your schedule.
This is the right tool for a seasonal lane. It's also worth checking when a booking page suddenly offers nothing: if the only active type got switched off, carriers have nothing to pick.