Your working hours

Your working hours are the baseline for everything a client can book. Maelo starts from the hours you keep each day, takes away anything already booked or blocked, and offers clients what is left. Get these right once and the rest of the booking form mostly looks after itself.

Hours are set per studio, under Settings, Scheduling, Home Locations. Each studio card carries a Schedule column with a row for every day from Mon to Sun.

1. 1

   Open the schedule

   Click any day in the Schedule column and the whole week becomes editable in place.
2. 2

   Type the hours

   Type them the way you would say them. 9am-5pm works, so does 11-7. Maelo reads it and fills in the times.
3. 3

   Mark the days you do not work

   Tick Closed on the right of a day and it drops out of your booking form entirely.

There is no save button. Changes save as you make them, and clicking anywhere outside the card collapses the week back to a read-only list.

Every time in Maelo is measured against your timezone: your working hours, your booking window, and every date a client picks. Set it under Settings, Scheduling, Timezone.

This is what lets a client in another country book you correctly. If you work 10am to 6pm in Vancouver and someone in London opens your booking form, they see your slots in their own time, and the appointment still lands where you meant it to. You never have to do the maths, and neither do they.

If you split your week between studios, add each one under Home Locations and give it its own hours. Keep them from overlapping, since Maelo will otherwise offer you at two places at the same time.

Each studio card has its own controls, so a studio can be set up and visible without taking bookings:

• •Taking requests turns new enquiries on or off for that studio alone.
• •Taking flash requests does the same for flash enquiries there.
• •Click the name, address or arrival instructions on a card to edit them in place.

A trip is an event, not a change to your weekly hours. Create one from New Event on the calendar, or from the Events page, and give it its own dates, location and hours.

An event ignores your studio schedule completely and runs on its own hours, which is what you want when you are working 12 to 8 at a convention you would normally be closed for. It also blocks your studio calendar for those days, so nobody can book you at home while you are away.

Events have their own booking switches too, so you can open the trip for bookings before you travel and close it once you are full.

You should not have to edit your weekly schedule for a late start on one Tuesday. Click that date on the calendar and change the times under Working hours in the day panel. That change applies to that date only, and a Reset link puts it back.

If the day is normally closed, the panel offers Open just this date instead, which is how you take work on a day you are usually off.

Under Settings, Scheduling, Calendars you can set Week starts on to Monday or Sunday. It changes how your calendar grid is drawn and nothing else. Your hours, bookings and availability stay exactly as they were.