When no times appear, or too many appointments can overlap, check the configuration in this order:
No times are available
1. Location: Is it active, and does it have weekly hours for the requested date?
2. Appointment Type: Is it active, assigned to the location, and enabled for the booking path being tested?
3. Appointment Type Rules: Do lead time, booking window, and max-per-day limits allow the requested time? If the appointment type uses its own schedule, confirm that schedule has hours open on the requested date, even when the rules themselves look correct.
4. Staffing: Does every required position have a qualified active person? Are required or named staff working at that time? A person's weekly hours are set per location, but a date-specific exception for that person applies everywhere. If a named staff member or someone filling a required position only has weekly hours at a different center, check their date-specific exceptions before assuming they have no coverage at the booking center. If the position has an explicit needed at once headcount instead of relying on staff schedules, that number can also limit or remove times even when staff schedules look fine.
5. Resources: Rooms, equipment, and shared capacity limits can hide every open time even when hours and staffing look fine. Check these in order:
Open Scheduler > Scheduler Settings > Resources. Confirm each resource the appointment type should use is active.
Confirm the resource is assigned to the same location you are booking. A resource belongs to only one location. Multi-location centers need a separate resource per site (name them clearly, for example Main Center Ultrasound Room).
On the Appointment Type (Scheduling section), confirm the resource is linked. If the type needs a room or shared limit but nothing is linked, slots can still open when you did not intend them to—or capacity will not protect the bottleneck you care about.
Check capacity. Capacity 1 means only one linked appointment can use that resource at a time across every appointment type linked to it. If Pregnancy Test and Ultrasound both use the same capacity-1 room, booking one removes the overlapping time for the other.
Look for an existing booking (including buffer time around it) that already consumes the resource for that slot.
Remember: resources are rooms, equipment, or shared capacity pools—not people. People and work schedules belong under Staffing. Naming a person as a resource usually creates the wrong kind of limit.
Full setup steps: [Resources and Shared Capacity](https://help.coolfocus.app/en/articles/17180902-resources-and-shared-capacity).
6. Closures: Is there a holiday, date exception, scheduler block, or partial-day closure?
7. Buffers: Does time before or after another appointment consume the slot?
8. Public page: Is the appointment type published on an active scheduling page and not unintentionally private?
Use Scheduler Settings > Overview and availability or coverage preview to identify warnings before changing rules.
The coverage preview's Preview location picker remembers the last location you tested for each appointment type, so reopening the preview keeps you on the same location instead of resetting to the first one assigned. If that saved location is later removed from the appointment type, the preview falls back to a location still assigned to it.
A location and its appointment type share one schedule
If a location and one of its appointment types both point at the same custom schedule, and the weekly template for that schedule is closed every day (for example, a schedule meant to be open only through date exceptions), confirm the date exceptions were added on the Exceptions & holidays tab of that shared schedule. CoolFocus applies the shared schedule's weekly hours and date exceptions once, so an available override on that schedule opens the day for both the location and the type together. If the day still previews as Closed after adding the exception, check that the override date, start time, and end time match what you expect, then re-run the preview.
A custom schedule doesn't seem to apply to an appointment type
If you built a custom schedule for an appointment type, like a smaller weekly window for PT (Pregnancy Test) appointments, but the type still follows the location's regular hours, open Scheduler > Scheduler Settings > Types, select the appointment type, and go to its Scheduling section. Confirm the schedule field is set to your custom schedule, not Location Hours or a different existing schedule. Save the appointment type, then preview it again. The preview's Location hours row now names the type's own schedule when it differs from the location's, with the location hours listed alongside as the outer limit, so you can confirm the right schedule is applied without leaving the preview. The preview's hours line names the schedule actually assigned to that appointment type, so two types with different schedules now show different hours there instead of both echoing the location's hours.
If the hours still don't match after you select the right schedule, check whether that same custom schedule is also assigned to another location or appointment type. A shared schedule applies its weekly hours and date exceptions to everyone using it, so a change made for one location or type changes it for all of them. Create a separate schedule when an appointment type genuinely needs different hours from what other locations or types share.
Appointments are double-booking
Confirm every affected appointment type links to the same shared resource.
Confirm the resource is assigned to the correct location.
Confirm capacity is not higher than intended.
If the coverage preview shows a note that no concurrency limit is set for this location, none of the three gates are configured: the schedule's Max concurrent, a per-location limit for this appointment type, or a linked resource. Every slot stays open no matter how many appointments already overlap it.
Confirm the schedule's Weekly template Slots field for that day is not set higher than intended; a Slots value above 1 lets more than one appointment book into the same time even when resources and staffing look correctly limited.
Check whether staff created the conflicting appointment by overriding a warning.
Remember that a required position identifies qualified coverage; it may not create a cross-type shared limit by itself. Use a shared resource when two appointment types must not overlap on the same room, equipment, or capacity pool.
Preview the appointment type at this location. If nothing limits how many appointments of this type can overlap here, the coverage preview says so directly and names the three ways to add a limit: a schedule's Max concurrent setting, a per-location limit for the appointment type, or a linked resource.
If none of these settings are in place at all, the appointment type's coverage preview shows a notice that no concurrency limit is set for that location, so slots stay bookable no matter how many appointments already overlap them. Set Max concurrent on the schedule, a per-location limit for the appointment type, or link a resource to close the gap.
Staff can see time that clients cannot
Staff scheduling may allow an intentional override while public booking enforces availability and capacity. Also compare the staff-selected location, booking path, lead time, and private/public status.
Clients can see a time that staff did not expect
Check time zones, shared availability templates, appointment-type overrides, optional versus required positions, and whether a resource link is missing.
Appointments show on the List tab but not on a calendar view
If an appointment shows correctly on the Scheduler List tab with its date and time, but does not render on Day, Week, Month, or Group calendar views, check these before assuming the appointment itself is broken:
1. Hide on Scheduler: If the appointment's type has Hide on Scheduler checked, the appointment is deliberately excluded from every CoolFocus calendar view. This setting is meant for legacy CoolFocus 3.0 types and is working as intended if checked.
2. Appointment type or resource filter: Confirm the sidebar's type or resource filter is set to show everything, not narrowed to a set that excludes this appointment's type or resource.
3. Staff or location filter: Confirm the staff filter (including My Schedule) and location filter are not narrowed away from this appointment.
An appointment type or resource being marked inactive is not a cause of this on its own: existing appointments booked under an inactive type or resource still show on every calendar view, the same as on the List tab. See Appointment Types and Booking Rules for the difference between Active and Hide on Scheduler.
A client says the online Schedule Appointment button will not work
Some appointment types ask the client extra questions (like "how did you hear about us?") before they can book. If those questions fail to load, on-line booking shows a short message and keeps Schedule Appointment disabled, since the type cannot be booked without its required answers.
The client can select Try again under that message to reload the questions without refreshing the page. If the questions load, the message clears and the client can finish booking normally. If Try again keeps failing, treat it as a real outage: ask the client to try again in a few minutes, and let support know which appointment type and organization were affected.
Booking fails with "no usable schedule is configured"
If a staff member tries to book a specific date and time and gets an error instead of a confirmation, CoolFocus now names the actual cause instead of one generic message. Depending on what's missing, the error says the appointment type was not found, the location was not found, or names the appointment type and location directly and explains that neither has a schedule with hours.
If the message says no schedule is configured and your organization has no default schedule either, set up a schedule with hours under Scheduler > Scheduler Settings, then try booking again.
Make one change at a time
After each change, preview the same appointment type, location, and date again. This makes it much easier to identify which rule controls the result.
If the preview and the public booking page disagree after these checks, contact support with the organization, appointment type, location, date, expected time, and screenshots of both views.
The Availability tab shows an error instead of loading
Sometimes the Availability tab shows an error message with an error ID (for example 2ec6300d) instead of your schedule. This means the page itself failed to load; it is not caused by the weekly hours you entered or by anything wrong with your configuration.
If you see an error ID on the Availability tab, contact support with the exact ID and tell them which schedule you were editing (the staff member, location, or appointment type). Support uses the error ID to look up what went wrong on our end.