Your Availability & Schedule card
How the Availability & Schedule card works — working hours, the open/closed calendar switch, unavailable periods, and the extra scheduling controls (booking window, break between clients) that piercers, laser and permanent makeup practitioners get.
Your Availability & Schedule card sets your working hours and whether you're currently taking bookings. It's one of the three cards a client needs filled before they can book you. It comes in two versions, wired automatically to your discipline — a simpler one for tattoo and body modification, and a fuller one for piercers, laser, and permanent makeup practitioners. The card is on the Info tab.
The calendar switch — the master control
Every version has a calendar status: open or closed for new bookings. When it's closed, the booking form won't open for clients no matter how good the rest of your setup looks — it's the master switch. If you're closing for a known stretch, you can set a reopening date, and clients will see when you'll be back.
The card counts as complete once you've got at least one working day switched on and have saved it.
The fields everyone gets
No matter your discipline, the card has the same core set of fields. The only difference is that time-based practitioners get a couple of extra scheduling controls on top — it's the same card with more options, not a completely different one. The shared fields are:
- Working hours — your open days and times each week.
- Lunch break — an optional daily break.
- Unavailable periods — date ranges when you're away (holidays, conventions). You pick a start and end date, a reason, and an optional note.
- Accepts walk-ins — a toggle to signal you take walk-ins.
- Notes — a free-text note about your availability.
For tattoo artists and body modification practitioners, bookings are negotiated rather than slot-picked, so your weekly hours are shown to clients as a guide to your studio days — they don't lock the booking. You and the client agree the actual dates during the proposal back-and-forth.
The extra controls for piercers, laser, and permanent makeup
These disciplines are time-based: clients pick a real slot from your calendar, so InkMap calculates open slots from your hours and your service durations. On top of the shared fields above, you also get:
- Break between clients — a buffer the calendar leaves between appointments. This is only the gap between back-to-back clients; it's not the same as the booking window below.
- Booking window — two independent, optional limits on when a client can book: a maximum number of days in advance, and a minimum number of hours of notice before a slot (so nobody books last-minute). The minimum notice is a lead time, not the break between clients — they're separate settings.
For why the two booking styles treat hours so differently, see Time-based vs project-based bookings.
Frequently asked questions
- I set my weekly hours but clients still can't book me. Why?
Check the calendar switch first — if it's set to closed, that overrides everything and blocks the booking form. Also make sure your Services & Pricing and Policies & Legal cards are filled, since all three are needed before a client can book.
- I'm a tattoo artist — do my weekly hours decide my appointment slots?
No. For tattoo and body-mod work the hours are shown to clients as a guide to your studio days, but the actual dates are agreed during the proposal back-and-forth. Only the time-based disciplines (piercing, laser, permanent makeup) build bookable slots from their hours.
- How do I take a holiday without closing my whole calendar?
Add an unavailable period for those dates. The calendar will skip them while staying open for everything else. Closing the calendar is for when you're not taking any new bookings at all.
Was this helpful?