A branch is a location clients can book at. Opening hours are what the booking engine reads to decide which times a customer can pick, so getting hours right is the difference between a working booking page and one that shows nothing. This guide covers adding a branch, the hours editor in detail, breaks and closures, and the one rule about how hours and staff hours combine that surprises the most owners.
Add a branch
Go to Branches, then New branch. Even a single-location salon needs one branch, because hours, bookings, and stock all hang off it.
Fields:
- Branch name (required).
- Address, phone, email (all optional, shown to customers where relevant).
- Tax rate: leave blank to use your business default, or set a rate for this location (0 is a valid override for a no-tax location).
- Active: an inactive branch is hidden from the booking page and from most lists.
If you already have a branch set up the way you like, the create form offers Start from an existing branch, which copies the service list and the branch's inventory item definitions (stock starts at 0). It does not copy hours or staff.
Plan note: the Solo plan includes one branch. Adding a second branch is a Growth feature. If you try to add another on Solo, you will see an upgrade prompt instead of the form.
The hours editor
Open a branch and go to the Hours tab. The editor is a row per day (Sunday through Saturday).
- Checkbox per day: unchecked means closed that day, and no times are offered on it.
- Start and end time per open day.
- Open all days / Close all days (top right): fills or clears the whole week in one click, keeping each day's existing times so you can fine-tune after.
- Copy to all: pushes one day's hours (including its break) to every day, so you can set Monday once and copy it across.
- Add break (per day): splits the day into a morning shift and an afternoon shift, with a gap in between. Use it for a lunch closure. "Remove break" merges it back.
One convenience to know: editing a time automatically marks that day open, even if the checkbox was off. So if you type hours into a day, it switches on.
The same editor is used for staff working hours (on each staff member's Schedule tab), so everything you learn here applies there too.
Closures (one-off and holidays)
The Closures tab on a branch (visible when editing, not when creating) is for one-off dates: public holidays, a renovation, a private event. A closure blocks every staff member at that branch for the dates it covers.
- A closure can be all day or a time range (for example, closing early at 14:00).
- Add an optional reason. If you set one, customers see it on the booking page ("Branch is closed (public holiday)"). Without a reason, they just see that the branch is closed that day.
- If you add a closure over dates that already have bookings, Flowesce warns you and lists the affected appointments so you can reschedule them. The closure still saves; moving the bookings is a separate step you do yourself.
The rule that surprises people: hours are an intersection
This is the most important thing in this guide.
A time is only offered to a customer when it falls inside both the branch's opening hours and the staff member's working hours. The booking engine takes the overlap of the two, not the union.
So if a branch is open 09:00 to 18:00 but the only staff member working that day is set to 07:00 to 09:00, the overlap is empty, and the customer sees no times, with a generic "no times fit on this day" message. Each staff member needs hours that actually sit inside the branch's open window.
From the overlap, Flowesce then removes: staff time off, branch closures, existing bookings, and any buffer padding on the service. What is left is what a customer can pick.
Two more controls that affect which times show
These live in Settings, then Business, under booking preferences, and they quietly remove times from the page:
- Minimum notice (lead time): hides any slot starting within the next N hours. Set this to 48 hours and tomorrow's times will not appear, which is the usual cause of "I can see the day but no times."
- How far ahead bookings open (advance window): defaults to about 90 days. Dates beyond it return nothing.
What can go wrong
- A whole day shows no times. The branch has no hours for that day of the week, or it has a closure that day. Check the Hours tab first, then Closures.
- A day is open but every time is gone. The most common cause is staff working hours that do not overlap the branch hours (see the intersection rule above). Other causes: everyone is on time off that day, the day is fully booked, or your minimum-notice setting is hiding the near-term slots.
- The last bookable time is earlier than your closing time. If a service has buffer time after it, the appointment plus its buffer has to finish before you close. A 60-minute service with a 15-minute after-buffer in a salon that closes at 18:00 stops offering starts after 16:45.
- Times look an hour off around a clock change. Flowesce stores every appointment in universal time and shows it in your salon's timezone, so a daylight-saving change is handled for you. If times look wrong, confirm your business timezone is set correctly in Settings, then Business.
What's next
Hours are only half of availability. The other half is staff: each person needs hours of their own, and needs to be linked to the right branch and services. Continue with Add staff, assign their work, and set who can see what. If your page already has no times and you want a fast checklist, see Why your booking page shows no available times.