Calendar overview

Your calendar is the one place where everything you have going on shows up together. Bookings taken through Maelo, time you have blocked out, guest spots and any calendar you have connected all land on the same grid.

Four tabs sit across the top: Agenda, Day, Week and Month. Agenda is a running list of what is coming up, which is usually the fastest way to answer "what have I got on". Day and Week zoom into the hours. Month is the overview you plan from. Maelo opens on Month on a computer and on Agenda on a phone, and you can switch at any time.

The arrows either side of the date move you a period at a time, and Today on the far right jumps you back. Click the date itself to open a picker and go straight to a month or a day.

Everything on the calendar comes from one of four places: an appointment booked through Maelo, time you blocked out yourself, a personal event, or an event pulled in from a calendar you have synced. Click any of them to open the details.

The Filter calendars button in the header hides or shows a source, and Calendar Colours in the three dots menu lets you recolour or hide any of them. If your synced work calendar is drowning out your bookings, that is where you turn it down.

In Agenda view there is an extra button that switches to Show Maelo appointments only. That strips out everything synced from elsewhere and leaves just the clients you have booked.

Anything you add by hand starts at the + button. It offers three things, and they are genuinely different:

• •Add Appointment books a client straight in, without waiting for them to fill in your booking form.
• •Block Time makes a stretch unbookable. Lunch, a day off, a dentist trip.
• •New Event is a trip or a guest spot, with its own dates, location and hours.

Right-click any day (long-press on a phone) for the same actions aimed at that date, plus Edit Availability for reshaping that one day's hours.

Click any day and the panel on the right fills with that date: how many appointments you have, who they are with, and the hours you are working.

Under Working hours you can change the start and end time for that single date. It does not touch your weekly schedule, so shortening a Thursday here leaves every other Thursday alone. If the day is closed you get Open just this date, and once you have made a change a Reset link puts it back to your usual hours.

In Month view, open the three dots menu and choose Show Availability. The grid repaints so you can see, at a glance, what a client would find if they opened your booking form today. The key is simple: Open means bookable, and Closed / booked means they cannot take that time.

It opens on All places: each day shows the hours for wherever you are working that day, and names the place when there is more than one. During a guest spot the day carries the event's name and its own hours. A dropdown labelled Availability for appears at the same time. Your hours are set per studio, so use it as a filter when you only want one studio or one event on the grid.

The three dots menu shows Books Open or Books Closed with a coloured dot, so you can always tell whether new enquiries are coming in. Selecting it takes you to Settings, Scheduling, Home Locations, where the Taking requests control lives.

Turning it off pauses new bookings without taking your page down. You can leave a short message for clients, and you can schedule a re-open date so your books come back on without you having to remember. Nothing already on your calendar is affected.

For everything that controls when clients can book, see Booking rules.