Arrival windows, hours and emergency slots

The agent books arrival windows (e.g. 8–10 AM), not exact times, because that is what field work can promise. Windows are generated from your hours. The appointment booking feature page has the overview.

Hours

Agent → Hours. Set open and close per day, or mark a day closed. Calls outside hours are tagged after-hours and follow your emergency rules; the agent still answers.

Window length

Agent → Booking → Arrival window. Two hours is typical for residential service; some shops use four-hour windows for installs. Windows start at your open time and repeat until close. The arrival window glossary entry explains why shops book windows instead of exact times.

How availability is checked

During the call the agent calls check_availability for the date the caller wants. It looks only at appointments DispatchLine booked itself and offers up to two open windows. It never offers a window in the past or one that’s taken. It cannot see an outside calendar, so a job you scheduled somewhere else is invisible to it: if you have committed a block of time elsewhere, shorten that day’s hours or mark the day closed before the calls come in. Google Calendar sync and a Jobber connection are in development, and field-software sync for Housecall Pro and ServiceTitan is planned.

Why you cannot hold a window back for emergencies

There is no window you can hold back for emergencies. Every open window goes to whoever books it first. What an emergency does change is the calendar: on a day you have marked closed, an emergency call can still be offered windows between 7 AM and 9 PM, and the agent books the earliest one.

Capacity

One job per window. The agent will not offer a window that overlaps an appointment it has already booked, and there is no setting for a second crew, so a shop running three trucks still takes one booking at a time from the phone. The rest is scheduled by your office.

Drive time

There is no separate drive-time buffer. The arrival window is the only spacing you control, so make it long enough to cover the drive between two jobs.