Here is a problem worth knowing about, because it is invisible from inside the clinic. You open Cliniko and see a diary with plenty of space. A patient opens your booking page and sees three times, all awkward. Nothing is broken and nobody has made a mistake. A handful of settings are quietly deciding what the outside world is allowed to see, and they are almost always more restrictive than the owner intends.
We found this on a live clinic while building their booking flow. The diary was open. The booking page offered barely anything. Every one of the causes below is free to fix and takes minutes.
1. Max appointments per day segment
This is the one that catches people, and it hides in Settings, then Online bookings.
What it does. Cliniko splits the day into segments, roughly morning, afternoon and evening. This setting caps how many appointments online booking will offer per segment. If it is set to one, a patient is shown a single morning slot, a single afternoon slot and a single evening slot, no matter how empty the rest of the day is.
Why it looks like a bug and is not. The slots also appear to move around. Someone books the one morning slot, and a different morning time appears in its place. From the outside this reads as a glitch. It is the cap doing exactly what it was told.
How to check. Settings, then Online bookings, then look for maximum appointments per day segment. If it is a number rather than unlimited, that number is the ceiling on what patients can see. Unless you are deliberately protecting time, set it to unlimited.
Why it matters: a patient looking at three inconvenient times concludes you are booked up and rings elsewhere. She is not rejecting your clinic. She is rejecting the only three times she was shown.
2. Practitioner availability that was never filled in
What it does. Cliniko builds online availability from each practitioner's working hours, not from the emptiness of the diary. No working hours set means no bookable time, however clear the week looks.
How to check. Settings, then People, pick the practitioner, then Availability. Confirm the hours are there, that they cover the days you actually work, and that they run at the business you expect if you have more than one location.
The common version of this. Hours were set up once, then the clinic added a Saturday morning or a late Thursday and told everyone except Cliniko. The new hours exist in the practitioner's head and nowhere else.
3. Appointment types not shown online
What it does. Every appointment type has a switch for whether it appears in online bookings. Turned off, that treatment is invisible to patients no matter how much time is free.
How to check. Settings, then Appointment types, and look down the list for which are enabled for online booking.
Why it is worth a proper look, not a glance. This is usually correct for good reasons. You may genuinely not want strangers booking nail surgery without an assessment first. Keep those off deliberately. What you are hunting for is the type that is off by accident, typically a newer treatment added after the original setup, and typically one of the profitable ones.
4. Notice periods and booking windows
What it does. Cliniko can require a minimum notice before an appointment can be booked online, and can limit how far ahead patients may book.
Where it goes wrong. A 24-hour notice period is sensible for a busy clinic and quietly expensive for a quiet one, because it removes exactly the person who wants to be seen today. A short booking window, say two weeks, blocks the patient trying to plan around a holiday.
How to judge it. Do you have gaps tomorrow? If your diary regularly has same-day space, a long notice period is protecting you from the patients you most want.
The oracle: how to tell settings from software
Worth knowing, because it saves everyone a wasted week. Cliniko gives you a hosted booking page of your own, at your clinic's Cliniko address, which you will find under Settings, then Online bookings. That page is Cliniko's own, running on Cliniko's own logic.
Use it as the referee. If your website's booking shows nothing, open that hosted page. If it also shows nothing, the problem is account configuration, and no website change can fix it. If the hosted page shows plenty and your website does not, the problem is in the website.
Why this matters: it settles the argument in thirty seconds and stops you paying someone to debug code that was never broken.
Do this today, for nothing
Three checks, about ten minutes, no help needed.
Open Settings, then Online bookings, and set max appointments per day segment to unlimited unless you are capping it on purpose. Open your own hosted booking page on your phone and count how many times you are actually offered this week. Then read down your appointment types and find the one that should be bookable online and is not.
Do these before you buy anything from anyone, ourselves included. It is genuinely common for a clinic to be about to pay for a booking system when the real problem was a cap set to one.
If you have run all four checks and patients still cannot see your free time, that is worth twenty minutes of ours. Bring a screenshot of your hosted booking page and what your diary looks like for the same week.
