Your Availability & Schedule card

• 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 simple version — tattoo and body modification

  Because tattoo and body-mod bookings are negotiated rather than slot-picked, your weekly hours here are shown to clients as a guide to your studio days, but they don't lock the booking — you and the client agree dates during the back-and-forth. This version covers:

  • 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), with an optional yearly repeat.
  • Accepts walk-ins — a toggle to signal you take walk-ins.
  • Notes — a free-text note about your availability, up to 500 characters.

• The fuller version — piercers, laser, and permanent makeup

  These disciplines are time-based: clients pick a real slot from your calendar, so InkMap has to calculate open slots from your hours and your service durations. On top of everything in the simple version, you also get:

  • Booking window — how far in advance clients can book (a maximum number of days out) and how much notice you need (a minimum number of hours before a slot).
  • Break between clients — a buffer of a few minutes to an hour that the calendar leaves between appointments.
  • Slot calculation — smart, which builds slots from each service's actual duration, or regular, which uses a fixed slot length you set.
  • Edge-case handling — whether a slightly-too-long appointment is squeezed into one slot or given two.

  For why the two disciplines 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.