FAQ & Troubleshooting

Availo is a booking and scheduling platform for service businesses. You set up your services, configure your availability, and optionally build a smart intake flow — then embed a booking tool right on your website so customers can book without ever leaving your page.

Nope! Setting up your services, flows, and availability is all done through the admin dashboard — no code required. The only step that involves code is pasting a small HTML snippet into your website. If you don't want to deal with that at all, every flow also gets a hosted booking page with a shareable URL, so you can just link to it instead.

The booking tool is a lightweight script you paste into your website's HTML. It loads the Availo booking experience right on your page — no iframes, no redirects. Your customers interact with it like it's a native part of your site.

Yes. The booking tool is fully responsive and works great on phones, tablets, and desktops.

Here's the full flow:

1. 1.Customer picks a time slot — a temporary hold is placed to prevent double-bookings
2. 2.They fill in their details (name, email, etc.)
3. 3.Booking is confirmed — the hold converts to a booking
4. 4.Both you and the customer receive confirmation emails
5. 5.If you have calendar integration, a calendar event is created automatically

Yes! Every active flow gets a hosted booking page with its own URL (like booking.availo.co/your-company/your-flow). You can share this link directly in emails, on social media, or as a button on your website — no code needed.

Yes — every service needs at least one resource assigned to it. Without a resource, the booking tool won't show any available time slots (the availability API returns nothing to book against). Even if it's just you running things solo, add yourself as a Person resource and assign it to your service.

The assigned resource also shows up in booking confirmation emails — both yours and your customer's — so they know exactly who is handling their appointment.

You need to set up Business Hours in Settings first. Availo needs to know when you're available before it can create bookable time slots.

Fix: Go to Settings → Business Hours, set your weekly schedule, click Save, then try creating your service again.

When editing a service, look for the Availability section. Switch it from “Use organization hours” to “Custom hours” and set a unique schedule just for that service. Service custom hours override org hours entirely, so you can offer a service outside normal business hours if needed.

Buffer time adds a gap after each appointment. If you have a 60-minute service with a 15-minute buffer, Availo blocks off 75 minutes total. This prevents back-to-back appointments and gives you time to prep, travel, or just breathe between bookings.

This controls how far in advance someone can book. If you set it to 24 hours, no one can schedule an appointment within the next 24 hours. Great for preventing last-minute surprises you can't prepare for.

You can find this under Settings → Booking Defaults → Minimum Notice.

Your organization's timezone (set in Settings) is the source of truth. All availability is calculated in your timezone. Customers automatically see time slots in their own local timezone, so there's no confusion about times.

Yes! Go to Settings → Booking Defaults and toggle on Booking Reminders. You can set how far in advance reminders go out — anywhere from 1 hour to 7 days before the appointment.

Flows are optional but recommended. Without a flow, you can embed the booking tool with a specific service and customers go straight to time-slot selection. But with a flow, you can ask qualifying questions, route different customers to different services, offer instant quotes, and collect callback requests. That's where the real value is.

Yes! You can have as many active flows as you want, each with its own embed code and hosted URL. This is great if you serve different audiences from different pages on your website — for example, a “Get a Residential Quote” flow on one page and a “Book a Commercial Consult” flow on another.

While editing a flow, use the Preview button to walk through it as a customer would. You'll see the full experience without anything going live. Great for catching issues before your customers do.

Visibility conditions let you show or hide questions based on previous answers. For example, you can make “How many bedrooms?” only appear if the customer selected “Residential” for property type. This keeps the flow clean and only shows questions that are relevant to each customer.

That's what the Default Fallback outcome is for. One outcome is always marked as the fallback — it catches any answers that don't match your specific routing rules. Always make sure you have one set!

Yes — this is called Service Routes. Within an Instant Book or Instant Quote outcome, you can set up multiple service routes, each with its own conditions. For example, route residential customers to “House Cleaning” and commercial customers to “Office Cleaning” — all in the same flow.

Availo validates your flow before it goes live. Common issues that block publishing:

• ➤An outcome isn't fully configured — every outcome needs to be set up or marked “Not used directly”
• ➤An Instant Book or Instant Quote outcome doesn't have a service assigned
• ➤No fallback (default) outcome is selected
• ➤The flow has no questions or outcomes at all — add at least one of each

The error messages will point you to exactly what needs fixing.

Yes. Open the flow builder, make your changes, and re-publish. Your changes go live immediately on the next publish.

Draft — work in progress. Editable, not visible to customers.
Active — published and live. Can be embedded and shared.
Archived — retired. Read-only, no longer accepting responses, but can be duplicated if you want to build a new version.

When a customer selects a time slot, Availo creates a temporary hold on that slot. This prevents double-bookings while the customer fills in their details. If they don't complete the booking within the hold window, the hold expires and the slot becomes available again automatically.

Yes. Customers receive a confirmation email with a link to manage their booking. From there, they can cancel it. Rescheduling is handled by your team from the Bookings dashboard.

Go to Bookings → click the booking → click Reschedule. You'll see the availability calendar and can pick a new time. The customer gets notified automatically.

Go to Bookings, find your test booking, click it, and hit Cancel. A cancellation notification would normally go out, so you may want to use a test email address when testing.

Org hours are your organization's default operating hours. Resource hours let you set custom availability for a specific team member, location, or piece of equipment. When a resource has custom hours, Availo intersects them with org hours — the resource is only available when both the org and the resource are available. Services can override org hours entirely (e.g., a service offered outside normal business hours).

When multiple resources are assigned to the same service, Availo pools their availability. A time slot shows as available if any of the assigned resources is free. When a customer books, Availo automatically assigns the first available resource. No manual assignment needed.

Go to the Time Off section (under Capacity in the sidebar). You can block off time for:

• ➤A specific resource — their availability is blocked (vacations, personal days)
• ➤The whole organization — all resources are blocked (holidays, company events)

Yes! Connect Google Calendar under Integrations, then assign it to a resource. Availo will:

• ➤Check your calendar for conflicts (syncs every 5 minutes)
• ➤Automatically create calendar events when new bookings come in
• ➤Optionally generate unique Google Meet links for virtual appointments

Yes. Each resource can have their own calendar connected. Perfect for teams where each person manages their own calendar.

This happens when one or more resources assigned to that service are missing a write calendar. Auto-generated Meet links require every assigned resource to be able to create calendar invites.

To fix it:

1. 1.Go to Capacity → Resources
2. 2.Open each resource listed in the warning
3. 3.In Linked External Calendars, set Create calendar invites when booked to a calendar (not None)
4. 4.Return to the service and save again

Availo checks your connected calendar every 5 minutes for busy blocks. Any events on your calendar will mark those time slots as unavailable in the booking tool.

Microsoft Outlook, Zapier, and Webhooks are on the roadmap. Google Calendar is currently the only supported integration.

1. 1.Go to Services → select a service → Pricing tab
2. 2.Set a base price
3. 3.Add pricing questions (e.g., "How many rooms?" or "Square footage?")
4. 4.Configure how each answer adjusts the price (flat addition, multiplier, etc.)
5. 5.Optionally set minimum/maximum prices and a tax rate
6. 6.In your Flow, create an Instant Quote outcome that links to this service

Yes! After seeing their quote, customers can accept it and proceed to book. The quote is linked to the booking so you always have a record of what was estimated.

Yes. In the Flow Builder, click Import from Instant Quoting to pull in pricing questions you've set up in a service's Pricing tab. This way customers answer the pricing questions as part of the flow experience.

If you don't import pricing questions into the flow's main question list but the customer is routed to an Instant Quote outcome, Availo asks any remaining pricing questions needed for that quote after they reach that outcome—before the quote is shown.

Check these things in order:

1. 1.Open the browser console (F12 → Console tab) and look for any JavaScript errors. Common issues show up here.
2. 2.Check the container element — the <div id="availo-booking"></div> must exist on the page before the script runs.
3. 3.Verify the publishable key — double-check that the key in your embed code matches the one in your Availo dashboard.
4. 4.Check the flow status — only Active (published) flows will load in the booking tool. Draft and Archived flows won't appear.

Work through this checklist:

1. 1.Business hours set? Go to Settings → Business Hours and confirm you have hours configured.
2. 2.Service assigned to a resource? At least one resource must be assigned to the service. Without a resource, the API returns no slots.
3. 3.Resource available? Check for time off blocks, calendar events, or custom resource hours that might be blocking all slots.
4. 4.Minimum notice too high? If minimum notice is set to 48 hours, slots within the next 48 hours won't show. Check Settings → Booking Defaults.
5. 5.All slots taken? If you're testing on a day with very limited availability, existing holds or bookings may be filling all slots.

1. 1.Check notification preferences — go to Team and confirm your notification toggle is turned on.
2. 2.Check additional recipients — if you're expecting emails at a shared inbox, make sure it's listed under Additional Recipients in the Team section.
3. 3.Check spam — booking notifications sometimes get filtered. Check your spam or junk folder and add hello@availo.co to your allowed senders.

Availo validates the flow before going live. Common blockers:

• ➤An outcome isn't fully configured — set it up or mark it “Not used directly”
• ➤An Instant Book or Instant Quote outcome is missing a service assignment
• ➤No default (fallback) outcome is selected
• ➤The flow has zero questions and zero outcomes

The error messages will tell you exactly what to fix.

1. 1.Is the calendar connected? Check Integrations and confirm your Google Calendar is connected.
2. 2.Is the calendar assigned to a resource? The resource that gets assigned the booking needs a connected calendar.
3. 3.Give it a moment — calendar events are created asynchronously. It typically takes just a few seconds, but can occasionally take a minute or two.

First, check their spam folder — confirmation emails occasionally get filtered. You can also go to the booking in your dashboard and click Resend Confirmation to send it again.