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A staff member is a bookable person: the stylist, the therapist, the dentist. Clients book their time, so the slots on your booking page are worked out per staff member — from their own working hours, in their own timezone, minus everything already in their way. Most availability problems come from one of two places: hours that were never set, or a rule set somewhere else that quietly overrides the one you are looking at. Both are covered below.

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Add a staff member

Go to Business → Appointments → Staff — Manage staff members, their hours and the services they offer. An empty workspace shows No staff yet. Add one to get started.
1

Create the staff member

Select New staff member and give them a name. Email and Phone are both required — the form only marks Phone with a *, but saving without an email is rejected too. Timezone is required as well and comes pre-filled; check it before you save, because it decides what their working hours actually mean. A Job title is optional.
2

Link a team account (optional)

Link team member connects this staff member to a DMLY login — Link this staff member to a team account so they can manage their own bookings. Leave it empty for someone who does not log in to DMLY at all.
3

Let them take bookings

Turn on Accepts bookings and Active (available for booking). These are two separate switches, and DMLY only offers a staff member a slot when both are on.
4

Set their working hours

Fill in Working hours — the days and times they normally work. This is the foundation everything else subtracts from.
5

Save

Select Save staff member.
A staff member does not need a DMLY login. Leaving Link team member empty is normal for a contractor or a room-based resource. Linking only matters when that person will sign in and work their own bookings themselves.
Edit staff member and Delete staff member are on each row. Deleting asks Delete <name>? This can't be undone., but that warning overstates it: if the staff member has any bookings, DMLY does not delete them. It turns Active (available for booking) off instead and tells you A staff member with bookings was deactivated instead of deleted. Their history is protected automatically. Only a staff member with zero bookings is really removed — their availability, their service assignments and the row itself all go.
That auto-deactivation is a common source of missing slots. A staff member you tried to delete is now inactive while Accepts bookings is still on, so the row looks fine but they are never offered a slot. Turn Active (available for booking) back on to restore them.

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Working hours are in the staff member’s timezone

Each staff member carries their own timezone, and their Working hours are wall-clock times in that timezone. Nine in the morning for a staff member in Lagos is nine in the morning in Lagos, whatever timezone you or the client are in. DMLY converts the resulting slots for whoever is looking. This is the single most common surprise on a multi-location team: the hours are right, the timezone on the person is wrong, and every slot lands hours off.
A staff member with no working hours of their own is not treated as unavailable. DMLY falls back to the service’s own Weekly availability and its timezone instead. So a new staff member you never gave hours to can start appearing for bookings across the service’s whole window. Set hours on every staff member you add.
What clients see on the public booking page is a separate setting: Fixed timezone pins the page to one timezone for everyone, and without it the page renders in the contact’s own timezone. See Booking page.

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Which services a staff member offers

Each service lists its Assigned staff; a service with none shows No staff assigned yet. Assignment is what connects the two — a staff member is only ever offered for a service they are assigned to. On the booking page, a service with several assigned staff lets the client choose from a With dropdown. Alongside the named staff it offers Anyone available, which doesn’t pin the booking to one person: its slots are the union of every eligible staff member’s slots, so a time shows up if at least one of them is free. That union is why Anyone available almost always shows more availability than any individual, and why turning Accepts bookings off for one person often changes nothing visible. To remove the choice entirely, turn on Hide staff selection — Clients won’t choose a staff member; one is assigned automatically. This one lives on your workspace settings under Business → Appointments → Settings, not on the individual service, so it applies to every service at once.

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How availability is actually computed

This is the part worth reading. For a given staff member and service, DMLY starts with their weekly Working hours expanded into candidate start times, then removes:
1

Times that break the notice and horizon rules

Anything too soon to book, or too far out. See the next section — these rules come from two places at once.
2

Whatever the connected calendar says they are busy with

If a calendar is connected, its busy time is subtracted directly. External events DMLY does not own also become blocks automatically. See Calendar sync.
3

Their existing bookings, plus the service's buffers

Any booking that is still live — confirmed, pending, or holding a slot while it waits for payment — takes the time out, and so does the buffer before and after it. Cancelled, completed, no-show, failed and expired bookings free the slot back up.
4

Blocks and time off

Both the staff member’s own, and any workspace-wide block that applies to everybody.
5

Classes they are hosting

Every scheduled class session with that staff member as its host comes out too. Class seats are booked against the session rather than the host, so this is the only step that catches them. See Classes.
Whatever survives is a bookable slot. For Anyone available, DMLY runs this per staff member and merges the results.
A slot held for a pay-before booking is genuinely taken while the hold lasts — it is not bookable by anyone else until the hold clears or expires. That is deliberate. See Payments.

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Minimum notice and booking horizon come from two places

Notice and horizon are set in two places, under two different names — and, for notice, in two different units. DMLY combines them rather than letting one win. On your workspace settings, under Business → Appointments → Settings:
  • Minimum notice (hours) — Least amount of notice required before a booking can start.
  • Booking horizon (days) — How far in advance clients can book. Leave blank for no limit.
On the individual service, under Offerings → Services:
  • Min notice (min) — the same rule in minutes, not hours.
  • Days ahead — the same horizon. It cannot be left blank; the minimum is 1.
The service field is Min notice (min) — minutes. Typing 2 there buys you two minutes of notice, not two hours. Two hours is 120. Only the workspace field is in hours.
So if a service allows booking two hours ahead but your workspace requires 24, clients get 24. Set no workspace values and each service simply uses its own.
If one service ignores the notice you set on it, check the workspace setting before you touch the service again. The stricter number always wins, and it is easy to forget it is there.

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Block time and time off

Blocks are one-off holes in availability, made from the calendar view (Business → Appointments → Calendar — View and manage all bookings, classes and blocked time in one place). Select Block time to create one. All day covers a whole day; the Blocks view lists what exists, and removing one confirms with Block removed. A block can belong to one staff member, or apply across the workspace — the workspace-wide kind is how you handle a public holiday or a closure without editing everybody’s hours. Blocks subtract from availability on the public booking page immediately. They do not touch bookings that already exist — blocking a morning someone is already booked into does not cancel that booking.

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Manual bookings ignore availability on purpose

Booking someone in yourself from the Calendar does not check your published availability. That is intentional — an agent may squeeze a client in outside normal hours, outside the notice window, or on a blocked day. The one thing a manual booking still refuses is a genuine clash: it will not overlap the same staff member’s existing live booking. So “the booking page won’t offer this, but I can” is expected behaviour, not a bug. It also means your calendar can contain appointments no client could ever have made themselves.

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Two people booking the same slot

They cannot. DMLY locks the staff member’s row while a booking is written, re-checks the slot inside that lock, and backs it with a database constraint as a last line of defence. The loser of a race is told rather than double-booked:
  • On the public booking page: Sorry, that time was just taken — please choose another.
  • Inside DMLY: That time slot is no longer available
Both mean the same thing — pick another time. Nothing was booked.
Work down the list in order — the first one that fails is nearly always the cause.
  1. Accepts bookings is off for that staff member.
  2. Active (available for booking) is off — a separate switch, and easy to miss. Both it and Accepts bookings must be on. Remember a failed delete turns this one off for you.
  3. They are not in the service’s Assigned staff, or the service shows No staff assigned yet.
  4. Their Working hours don’t actually cover that time — check their timezone before the hours.
  5. Minimum notice rules it out — from the service’s Min notice (min) or the workspace’s Minimum notice (hours), whichever is stricter. Check the units before you conclude the number is wrong.
  6. The booking horizon rules it out — the service’s Days ahead or the workspace’s Booking horizon (days), whichever is shorter.
  7. A block, time off, or a workspace-wide closure covers it.
  8. They are hosting a class then. See Classes.
  9. A connected calendar says they are busy — including an event you created outside DMLY.
  10. An existing booking, or its buffer, overlaps it.
They almost certainly have no Working hours of their own, so they inherited the service’s Weekly availability. Set their hours and the fallback stops applying.

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Next

Services

Duration, buffers, notice, horizon and price live on the service — in Offerings.

Booking page

What clients see, the timezone they see it in, and the fields they fill in.

Calendar sync

Connect a calendar so outside commitments block your DMLY slots.

Classes

Group sessions with seats and a waitlist, rather than one-to-one slots.