At a Glance
The Time off button on your appointments page is where you record when you are not working, either whole days or a few hours. Those days show shaded on the month calendar, and TherapyLock warns you before you book across one. It warns you too if a booking clashes with a session or supervision already in your diary, though the wording differs between the two.
Recording time off
- Open your calendar and click Time off.
- Fill in What is it?. "Bank holiday", "Annual leave, half term", "CPD day". This is what you will see on the calendar later, so it is worth more than an empty block. You cannot save without it.
- Choose a Type: Holiday or day off, Personal appointment, CPD or training, Admin time or Other.
- For whole days, leave All day switched on and set First day and Last day. For a single day, leave the last day the same as the first. Then click Add time off.
You can block part of a day. Switch All day off and you get Day, From and To instead, which is the way to protect a morning, an afternoon, or a couple of hours for admin. The button then reads Block this time.
Repeating patterns are not supported yet. A standing arrangement such as "every Monday" has to be added as a range for now. Recurring non-working days are planned, and will arrive with the wider calendar work.
The window stays open after you add something, so you can enter several in a row. Your entries are listed below under Coming up and Past.
Those days now appear shaded on the Month view with their name on them, so you can see where your time off sits before you start booking anything in.
The part that saves you
The reason to record time off is what happens next.
When you set up a run of sessions and one of them lands on a day you are away, TherapyLock tells you before it saves anything. It lists the exact dates that clash and what you have marked each one as, so you can see the problem while it is still one decision rather than six.
From there you can move the start date and sort the whole series in one go.
Clashes with anything already booked
TherapyLock also checks your bookings against each other, not only against your time off.
Book a session, or a run of them, that overlaps something already in your calendar and you will see "This clashes with your calendar" before anything saves. It lists each clashing date, time and booking, then offers Change the time or Book anyway.
It works in both directions. A client session booked over supervision raises it, and so does supervision booked over a client session.
Two things it does not flag:
- Cancelled bookings. A cancelled session is not in your way, so it is not counted as a clash
- Supervision booked without a start time. With no time recorded there is nothing to compare
The two warnings are not the same
Whole days and part days behave differently, and the wording on screen tells you which you have hit.
- A part-day block counts as an ordinary clash. It appears in the "This clashes with your calendar" list as Blocked time followed by its name, alongside any sessions or supervision
- A whole day off gets its own warning instead, headed "You are not working on this date". The buttons there are Change the date and Book anyway, rather than Change the time
Either way you can still go ahead. Sometimes a client can only make the Tuesday of half term, and that is your call. The warning does not block you, it confirms with you, so you book deliberately rather than discovering it three weeks later.
If something's not right
- No warning appeared. The clash check works from days you have recorded as time off. If the day was not marked, there was nothing to warn you about. Add it, and future bookings will be checked against it.
- Your time off is not shaded on the calendar. Shading shows on the Month view. Switch views using the view switcher above the calendar.
- A clash you have already booked. Recording time off afterwards does not move sessions that already exist. Open the appointment and change its date, or, for a whole run, use the tick box that applies your change to the remaining sessions in the series.
- Changing an appointment is not checked for clashes. The warnings described above happen when you create a booking. Moving an existing one to a new date or time does not run that check, so look at the day yourself before you move something.
- Removing time off happens straight away. The bin icon beside an entry removes it immediately, with no confirmation step and no message afterwards. Add it again if you remove the wrong one.
Related articles
- The hours you do work — Setting your working hours and seeing free slots
Still Need Help?
If you have any other questions about TherapyLock, our support team is here to help.
Email us at support@counsellingtutor.com and we will be happy to assist.
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