Practical guide / Appointment Capacity & Waitlist 1.0
See the open place before confirming another booking.
Compare session capacity with bookings at the review date, and see the current manual waitlist state separately.
Your first useful result: Set up people and services Follow the first task
Set up people and services
Create a staff ID and each service duration in whole minutes.
Each staff member and service has its own session reference.
Review: Review the labelled results and correct source warnings before acting.
Open the timed session
Enter exact start/end times, a staff ID and its actual capacity. Overlapping sessions for the same staff are warned.
Confirmed bookings occupy session places at the review date.
Review: Review the labelled results and correct source warnings before acting.
Record places and requests
Enter confirmed bookings, dated cancellations and separate waitlist requests. Review open places before confirming another person.
Waiting requests stay separate from confirmed capacity and cancellations release places.
Review: Review the labelled results and correct source warnings before acting.
Check the assumptions.
- Save a working copy. Manual entry, with no automatic sync or external connections.
- Supplied tables have fixed capacities. Extend formulas, tables and validation together before using extra rows.
- Keep source units and metric definitions consistent. Blank means unknown; enter 0 only for a confirmed zero.
- Resolve the highlighted input rows before relying on the summary.
- Uses exact-mode XMATCH. Requires Excel 2021, Excel 2024 or Microsoft 365; older Excel editions are not supported. Native Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers have not been verified.
- A Session is one timed service with a finite number of places. A person may have only one active booking for that session.
- A waitlist request is never an automatic booking. An offer remains on the waitlist until a separate booking is confirmed.
- Closed is a current manual waitlist state without a closure date; earlier waitlist counts cannot be reconstructed from that state.
- This is a manual capacity register. It sends no invitations or reminders and does not process payments or measure travel time.
Keep a copy you can return to.
Keep the supplied clean and example files unchanged. Save your own working file with a useful name, such as appointment-capacity-2027-home.xlsx, and keep a dated backup before a large edit. A purchased ZIP is the blank source, not a backup of your entries.
If an input or formula is replaced
Undo the edit while it is still available, or return to a known good backup. If you need a fresh clean file, transfer only your records into its marked input cells and follow the setup guide again. Do not paste whole sheets over the supplied formulas, validations or reference lists. Check IDs, units, dates and linked results against the example before relying on the copy.
When the supplied rows are full
50 staff · 80 services · 160 sessions · 320 bookings · 300 waitlist. Calculation ranges and validations have fixed capacities. A new row below a table does not prove that every linked result includes it.
For a separate period, project or volume, preserve the old workbook and start a named clean copy. If records must carry forward, record exactly which inputs you transfer, preserve their references and compare the opening and closing figures. Avoid copying historical activity as both an opening amount and a new movement. There is no automatic migration between files.
Inspect the workbook before you choose.
View its real sheets and a fictional calculation example.
Explore Appointment Capacity & WaitlistWritten for version 1.0. Examples describe the supplied workflow; they are not customer results.