Multi-Room Availability
Open up your online booking to run 2–3 treatment rooms in parallel. Two settings — rooms per day and hands-on time 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.
First — What "Rooms" Really Are
Before setting anything up, it helps to know what a "room" is in Daobook. It isn't a named space on a floor plan — it's an availability lane: a way of telling your online booking "I can see this many clients at once." It's about capacity, not layout.
Two things follow from that:
- Rooms are numbered, and the numbering is fixed. They appear as Room 1, Room 2, Room 3… — you can't rename them or tie them to a particular physical room. Room 1 is simply your first lane, every day.
- It isn't a room-hire or rental manager. If you rent rooms out to others on fixed sessions with changeover gaps, that's a separate job — keep it outside Daobook and use this for your own diary (and anyone treating alongside you).
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: Set Specific Hours for a Room (Optional)
Sometimes a room isn't yours for the whole day — maybe you only have the second room in the mornings, or you share it with someone after lunch. On any day set to 2 or more rooms, a Room hours section appears under that day in Working Hours.
Click Add room hours, choose the room, and set the window it's open — for example, Room 2 open only 09:00–12:00. A room with no entry stays open all day, so you only add a row for the rooms that open late or close early.
A few things worth knowing:
- Room 1 isn't in the list, and that's deliberate. Room 1 is your base lane — its hours are your main working hours for that day. So there's nothing separate to set: if you want Room 1 to open later or finish earlier, just change that day's start or finish time at the top of the row. Room hours exists only to fine-tune the extra rooms (Room 2 onward) that don't match your main day.
- This narrows a room, it doesn't fully close it. To take a room out entirely for a day, use an unavailable block instead (Step 10).
- Outside its window, the room shows greyed on your calendar and won't accept online bookings that don't fit inside it.
Step 3: Set Your Hands-On Time
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 hands-on time — 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.
Choosing Numbers That Stack Well
Not every combination of appointment length and hands-on time actually overlaps. Think of your hands-on time as the clinic's booking rhythm — the interval between one client starting and the next. Two rules make it work:
- Keep hands-on time to half the appointment length or less. Any more and appointments can't overlap at all. A 45-minute appointment with 25 minutes hands-on is the classic trap: when your first client's needles come out at the 45-minute mark, you'd always be mid-needling the next client — so Daobook (correctly) books everyone one after another in a single room, and extra rooms add nothing.
- Make the appointment length an exact multiple of the hands-on time. Needle-out moments then land exactly between one client's needling finishing and the next one starting, and bookings tick along on a steady rhythm. 60 minutes with 30 hands-on offers a start every 30 minutes; 60 with 25 wobbles.
Combinations that stack cleanly:
| Appointment length | Hands-on time | Offers a start every… | Rooms to run it at full tilt |
|---|---|---|---|
| 45 min | 15 min | 15 min | 3 |
| 50 min | 25 min | 25 min | 2 |
| 60 min | 30 min | 30 min | 2 |
| 60 min | 20 min | 20 min | 3 |
| 75 min | 25 min | 25 min | 3 |
| 90 min | 45 min | 45 min | 2 |
| 90 min | 30 min | 30 min | 3 |
If a current appointment type doesn't stack — say a 45-minute follow-up with 25 minutes hands-on — nudge one number rather than both: make it 50 minutes long (keeping your 25 hands-on minutes), or keep it at 45 and trim the hands-on time to 15.
Mixing different services on the same day? Give every service you want to overlap the same hands-on time, and make each one's length a whole multiple of it. On a 25-minute rhythm, a 50-minute follow-up, 75-minute initial and 100-minute extended treatment interleave perfectly no matter who books first. On a 30-minute rhythm: 60, 90 and 120 minutes — with the bonus that every start lands on the hour or half-hour. Avoid mixing rhythms (a 60/30 service alongside a 50/25 one): it's allowed, but the mismatched needle-out moments carve dead gaps into your day.
Step 4: How It Changes Your Online Booking
Once both settings are in place, your public booking page starts offering staggered slots at each hands-on-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.
Don't worry if the online list doesn't show every mathematically possible start — that's deliberate. The page leads with clean times (on the hour and half-hour, plus starts that pack flush against your existing bookings) so clients see a tidy menu rather than a wall of 9:05 / 9:10 / 9:15 noise. As the day fills, new flush times surface automatically — capacity is never lost, it just isn't all displayed at once.
Step 5: 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 6: See Your Hands-On Time on the Calendar
Room lanes show you where everyone is; the hands-on cues show you when you're free to move. They live in Settings → Calendar Display, in the Hands-on time (multi-room) section — two independent options that give you at-a-glance feedback on a busy day. (The section only appears once you — or a colleague in your clinic — run a day at 2 or more rooms.)
Shade other rooms during hands-on time (on by default)
While you're hands-on with a client in one room, the other room lanes tint grey for that window — the same grey as a closed room. It reads as "you can't start anyone new here right now", and it's exactly the time online booking protects: the grey stretches are why a seemingly free lane isn't offered to clients.
So a full multi-room day stays legible at a glance: a plain lane means you're free to start someone there, a grey lane means that lane can't start anyone just now.
Deepen the colour during hands-on time (optional)
The second option works on the appointment blocks themselves rather than the empty lanes. Switch it on and each booking deepens in colour across its own hands-on window, then lightens once the client is resting with the needles retained — so you can read how far into hands-on each client is straight from their block.
The two cues are independent — run the grey lanes on their own, add the deepened blocks as well, or turn both off. Appointment types with no hands-on time set (massage, herbal consults) read as hands-on for their whole span — which is exactly right, since you're with that client throughout.
Step 7: Book Manually with the Stagger in View
Booking by clicking the calendar works exactly as it always has — on multi-room days the appointment type list just carries a little extra: each type shows its numbers — e.g. Follow-up Appointment (50 min · 25 min hands-on) — so you have what you need to reason about the stagger while you choose.
Manual booking is never blocked. Online bookings follow the stagger rules automatically; on your own calendar you're always free to overrule them. If you'd like to see where a service fits before you commit, Openings (next step) previews the valid times for you.
Step 8: Openings — See Every Place a Service Fits
Pick a service and Openings previews every time it could start that day — each one drawn as a green box in a free room lane. It earns its keep on a packed multi-room day, where the staggered bookings — and the hands-on shading from Step 6 — make it genuinely hard to eyeball the gaps a new client could squeeze into. On a quiet day it simply confirms what you can already see.
It's off by default, so switch it on first: Settings → Calendar Display → Show openings. That adds a + next to the Appointments heading — and it only affects your own view.
Click the + (Find openings) button and pick an appointment type. This is appointment-type-first booking: you choose the service before the time.
Once you've picked, the + turns into an Openings · … chip naming the service you're placing — so you always know the mode is on, and what you're about to book.
Green previews then fill in at every start the service fits, each in a room that's free to take it. Closely-spaced starts tile into strips rather than stacking, and near-duplicate times (say 10:55 and 11:00) collapse to the rounder one — so you get a tidy menu of real options, not a wall of 9:05 / 9:10 / 9:15 noise.
The previews are suggestions, not the only doors: click an opening or any empty slot and the booking window opens with that type and the exact time already filled in. Press Esc (or the ✕ on the chip) to exit.
Step 9: Drag Appointments Between Rooms
Drag an appointment left or right within the same day to move it between rooms. The preview 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 10: 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).
Room hours vs. an unavailable block — two ways to limit a room, for two situations. Room hours (Step 2) is the set-and-forget way to say a room is only open certain hours every week; an unavailable block is the one-off way to pull a room out for a specific day or time.
Open a Second Room for Manual Booking Only
Sometimes you want a second room available to you — for overflow, a walk-in, or squeezing someone in by hand — without opening it to online self-booking. You can have exactly that: set the day to 2 rooms, but leave the hands-on time blank on your appointment types.
Here's why it works. Online only offers a second client the same time when an appointment type has a hands-on time set — that shared-room gap is what a later booking slots into. Leave it blank and each appointment counts as hands-on for its whole length, so the booking page never doubles anyone up: online behaves as a single room. Your calendar still shows both lanes, though, and manual booking is never restricted — so you can drop a client into the second lane yourself whenever you need to.
In short: 2 rooms with a hands-on time gives you staggered online booking across both rooms; 2 rooms with the hands-on time blank gives you a second room that's yours to fill by hand, invisible to online clients.
What It Doesn't Do (and the Workaround)
Renting rooms out (room hire).
Daobook manages your time and your practitioners' time — not rooms as rentable assets. It can't offer fixed full-day or half-day hire sessions with a changeover gap, or a separate booking calendar per room for outside tenants. If you hire rooms out, run that side of things separately and keep Daobook for your own clinical diary.
Two practitioners sharing the same physical room.
Rooms are configured per-practitioner, so Daobook doesn't automatically know that Practitioner A's "Room 2" and Practitioner B's "Room 1" are the same physical space — left alone it would let both be booked at once, and physically you'd collide. Two ways to keep them apart:
- Split the room by time with Room hours (Step 2). If the sharing follows a pattern — say one practitioner has the shared room mornings, the other has it afternoons — set each practitioner's Room hours for that room to their half of the day. Outside their window the shared room greys out and online booking won't place anyone in it, so the two never clash. This is the set-and-forget fix for a regular arrangement.
- Claim it ad-hoc with an unavailable block (Step 10). For occasional or unplanned sharing, whoever's in the shared room first drops an unavailable block at that time in the shared room's lane on the other practitioner's calendar. A little manual overhead, but it holds the room for one-off overlaps.
If your team shares rooms in a way neither of these covers, let us know — we're glad to help you set it up.
Tips
- Defaults preserve old behaviour. Room count defaults to 1 and hands-on time 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.
- Rooms not filling up online? Check your numbers against Choosing Numbers That Stack Well above. In particular, a hands-on time that's more than half the appointment length can't overlap at all — clients will book one after another in a single room.
- Leave hands-on time 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.
- There's no buffer or wrap-up setting to configure. The needle-removal moment at the end of each appointment is protected automatically — online booking will never let another client's hands-on window swallow the time you step back in to take needles out.
- Room numbers are fixed. Rooms are always Room 1, Room 2, Room 3… in lane order — you can't rename them or tie them to a specific physical room. The number is just the lane, not a place.