Holiday How-To: Scheduling a Closed Business Day

It’s that time of year again, and with the holidays just around the corner, you’ll likely be needing to close your business for a day or two—or maybe more. Luckily, it’s easy to block out your schedule for entire days in your Mindbody site. Here’s how:

Step 1: Check your schedule.

First, you’ll want to make sure that none of your clients are already booked for services on the day you’ll be closing. Keep in mind that scheduling a closed business day just prevents new services from being scheduled on that day―it doesn’t automatically cancel the already existing appointments and reservations.

One easy way to check your schedule is to use the Schedule at a Glance report. Just enter the date you’re planning to close, and run the report to see all of the services scheduled for that day, including appointments, classes and enrollments.

Step 2: Reschedule or early cancel.

Next, you’ll want to either reschedule or early cancel these booked services. You can contact your clients directly, or you can set up an auto email to notify them of the change. You can quickly reschedule or early cancel from the Schedule at a Glance report, by clicking on the client's name. This will take you to the Client Home screen, where you’ll choose Schedule to find the service in question.

Step 3: Schedule a closed day.

Once you’ve cleared your schedule, all you have left to do is set up the closed day. A simple way is from your class schedule, where you can click Tools at the top right, and select Schedule a Closed Business Day from the dropdown menu.

If you don’t use a class schedule, you can set up a closed day from Manager Tools. Just click the Settings button, and find “Schedule a Closed Business Day” under Business Settings.

Once you’re on this screen, select the date of the closure. Then, you’ll want to enter a description, such as "Thanksgiving," “Hanukkah,” “Kwanzaa” or “Festivus.” Keep in mind that what you enter here will show up on the schedules for both your staff members and your clients. Lastly, you can choose to either close your entire business (all of your available services), or to just restrict specific service categories.

And with that, you’re done! You can cross this task off the list, and be on your way to a stress-free holiday season.