Troubleshooting · Availability
Your booking page shows no times
A slot appears only when every check passes at once — hours, doors, buffers, notice, capacity. Here's each thing that can quietly remove one, ordered from most to least likely.
Open AvailabilityStart here: is it empty, or just thinner than expected?
Those are different problems. Completely empty on every date is nearly always setup — no doors, or no operating hours. Some days work, some don't points at operating hours per weekday or closed dates. Today is empty but next week is fine is minimum notice, essentially always.
1. No active doors
A location with zero active doors returns nothing, on every date, for every appointment type. Nothing else about your setup matters until this is fixed.
Check Doors in the sidebar and confirm at least one is active. If you turned off Pre-assign dock doors, the Doors item is hidden from the sidebar — but SimpleDock still needs at least one active door on the location to generate slots at all. Go to Settings → Scheduling, switch pre-assign back on to reach the Doors page, add a door, then switch it off again.
2. No operating hours for that weekday
Operating hours are set per day of the week under Availability. A weekday with no window is closed, and the booker's calendar shows nothing for every date that falls on it. This is the usual cause of “Saturdays never work”.
3. The appointment doesn't fit before closing
An appointment has to finish inside the operating window, not just start inside it. A 2-hour type against hours of 8:00–17:00 has a last bookable start of 15:00, and anything after that disappears rather than spilling past close.
This is the one people read as a bug. If your longest type has swallowed the end of the day, either extend the closing time or shorten the type's duration.
4. Minimum notice
Minimum notice is set per appointment type and hides any start time sooner than that from now. At 24 hours, today is always empty and tomorrow is partly empty — exactly the “nothing available today” report.
Open Types, pick the type, and check Minimum notice. Options run from no minimum up to 72 hours.
5. Buffers colliding with neighbours
Buffers reserve clear time on either side of an appointment, and each appointment carries its own type's buffers. A slot is rejected if the new booking's buffered window overlaps an existing booking's buffered window.
So two types with 30-minute buffers need an hour of clear space between them, not thirty minutes. Generous buffers on a busy dock thin out the calendar faster than most people expect — if slots are vanishing in the middle of otherwise open days, this is usually why.
6. Closed dates
Closed dates block a specific date regardless of your weekly hours — holidays, maintenance, inventory. They live under Availability, where closed days appear struck through on the calendar. The label you give one (“Memorial Day”, “HVAC repair”) shows on the booker's calendar tooltip, so carriers see why rather than just finding a dead date.
7. The time is genuinely taken
How SimpleDock decides that depends on one setting:
| Mode | A slot is offered when |
|---|---|
| Pre-assign doors on | At least one door is free for the whole buffered window. Bookings are placed on a specific door. |
| Pre-assign doors off | Fewer than your door-capacity number of trucks overlap the window. No door is committed until arrival. |
Cancelled appointments never hold a slot. Pending ones do — see below.
8. The appointment type is inactive
Your public booking page only lists active appointment types, and only active booking questions within them. A type switched off in Types disappears from the carrier's picker entirely — which reads as “the booking page is broken” when it was the only type you had.
Things that look like the cause but aren't
| Suspect | Reality |
|---|---|
| Slots per hour | Sets the grid spacing carriers pick from — every 15 or every 30 minutes. It doesn't change how many trucks fit. Setting it to 1 makes the page look sparse without making you any busier. |
| Requiring approval | Doesn't hide slots. Bookings still land, they just arrive as pending and wait in Review. |
| Pending appointments | They hold their slot. A pile of unreviewed requests really can fill your calendar — clear the Review queue. |
| Hidden booking questions | Affect the form, never the calendar. |
| Timezone | Hours are interpreted in the location's timezone, so a carrier in another zone sees correctly converted times, not missing ones. If every time looks shifted by a fixed number of hours, check the timezone in Settings → Details. |
A quick way to isolate it
Open the booking page yourself at /book/your-location-slug and pick a date two weeks out. Two weeks clears minimum notice and most existing bookings, so it separates the two failure modes cleanly:
- Still empty — structural. Doors, operating hours, duration versus window, or an inactive type.
- Times appear — your setup is fine and something near-term is filtering. Minimum notice, closed dates, or a full calendar.