Multi-Room Availability
Open up your online booking to run 2–3 treatment rooms in parallel. Two settings — rooms per day and time with client per appointment type — and Daobook handles the staggered booking logic for you.
Multi-Room Availability
If you run two or three treatment rooms in parallel — needling one client while another rests — Daobook can open up your online booking to match. Two settings, and the public booking page will offer staggered slots so you can see more clients in the same window without double-booking yourself.
Step 1: Set How Many Rooms You Use Each Day
Go to Settings → Working Hours. Next to each day's time range you'll see a Rooms number field.
Set 2 (or more) for the days you run rooms in parallel. Leave 1 for days you only use one room. Save.
Different days can have different room counts. If you have a receptionist on Thursdays who helps turn rooms around, that might be the only day you run 3 rooms — set the others to 1 or 2 as needed.
Step 2: Tell Daobook How Long You Spend With the Client
Go to Settings → Appointment Types and open the appointment type you want to enable staggered booking for — most commonly Acupuncture or Acupuncture Follow-up.
Under Scheduling & Pricing, click Set time with client — enables staggered booking for multi-room clinics. The hours/minutes selector opens.
Enter how long you actually spend with the client — consultation, needling, settling them in with the needles retained. For a 60-minute appointment where needles stay in for 30 minutes, that's typically 30 minutes with the client.
Leave this blank for appointment types where you're with the client the whole time — Tui Na, herbal consultations, cupping. Those don't benefit from multi-room scheduling and the system correctly falls back to single-room behaviour.
Step 3: How It Changes Your Online Booking
Once both settings are in place, your public booking page starts offering staggered slots at each treatment-time boundary.
Example: 60-min acupuncture, 30 mins with client, 2 rooms. One client books 9:00–10:00.
- 9:00 — blocked (you're with the first client)
- 9:30 — offered (the first client is now resting in Room 1; you're free to start a new client in Room 2)
- 10:00 — offered (first client leaves Room 1; second client still settling in Room 2)
- 10:30 — offered (both rooms free or transitioning)
- …and so on
Clients see more availability on your booking page without you having to manually juggle anything. Bookings come in assigned to whichever room lane is free first.
Step 4: See It on Your Calendar
Open Appointments and view a single practitioner's calendar on a day where Rooms is set to 2+.
You'll see:
- Room 1 / Room 2 sub-headers under the date
- A dashed vertical line splitting the day column into lanes (so it reads differently from the solid day boundaries)
- Overlapping appointments sit side-by-side in separate lanes
The all-practitioners view keeps the classic compact layout without room lanes — drop into a single practitioner's view when you specifically want to see which room each client is in.
Step 5: Drag Appointments Between Rooms
Drag an appointment left or right within the same day to move it between rooms. The ghost that follows your cursor narrows to a single lane as you drag, and the appointment stays in whichever lane you drop it into.
Click in a specific lane to create a new appointment there. Click the empty Room 2 lane at 2pm → the new-appointment modal opens pre-set for Room 2. The client is assigned to that lane from the moment you save.
Appointments stick to their lane. Dragging another appointment into an overlapping time won't bump the first one around — your visual layout stays predictable.
Step 6: Block One Room Off for a Specific Day
If one of your rooms is out of service for a day (a broken heater, a leaking ceiling, a room borrowed for another purpose), click in that room's lane and create an unavailable block.
Daobook treats the block as occupying that one room, so your online booking drops to room_count − 1 for that time — exactly as if you'd temporarily reduced your rooms for that day.
This is different from a break. Breaks block the whole practitioner (you're away from the clinic entirely — lunch, personal time) — no bookings in any room during a break. Unavailable blocks block one room — the rest are still bookable.
You can drop multiple blocks at the same time to claim multiple rooms if needed (e.g. two rooms out of three for the afternoon).
What It Doesn't Do (and the Workaround)
Two practitioners sharing the same physical room.
Rooms are configured per-practitioner, so Daobook doesn't know that Practitioner A's "Room 2" and Practitioner B's "Room 1" are the same physical space. If both get booked at the same time, Daobook will allow it — but physically you'd collide.
The workaround is unavailable blocks in the shared room's lane on the other practitioner's calendar. Whoever's booked in the shared room first, drop an unavailable block at that time on the other practitioner's calendar to claim it. Some manual overhead, but it works for occasional sharing.
If your whole team reliably shares rooms, let us know — a proper shared-room feature is a larger piece of work, and we'll build it if there's real demand.
Tips
- Defaults preserve old behaviour. Room count defaults to 1 and time with client to blank on every existing practitioner and appointment type. If you don't change anything, the calendar and online booking behave exactly as they did before this feature existed.
- Reducing room count doesn't touch existing bookings. If you drop from 3 rooms to 2 while 3 concurrent appointments are already booked, the existing appointments stay put. Only future online bookings respect the new count.
- Break vs. unavailable block — remember: breaks block all rooms, unavailable blocks block one room. Use each correctly.
- Leave time with client blank if you don't use rooms. The feature is opt-in per appointment type. A Tui Na practitioner running one room can ignore it entirely.