Define your service area
The area you travel to customers in — how to draw it, and what a customer outside it is told.
Your service area is the map of where you are willing to drive. When someone books, Schedulinq compares their address against that area: inside it, they are offered times; outside it, they are told you do not come there.
This only applies to services that take place at the customer. Services that happen at a location — where the customer comes to you — ignore your service area entirely.
Two ways to set it up
Organisation-wide
One area for the whole team. Everyone covers the same ground.
By far the simplest, and enough as long as your team works out of one place. You have one circle or one shape to maintain instead of one per person.
Per professional
Every team member gets their own area. You create areas, name and colour them, and assign people to them.
Necessary as soon as your coverage is regional. When someone books, Schedulinq only searches the calendars of the people whose area covers that address — so a customer in Arnhem is never offered the colleague based in Haarlem.
Drawing an area
There are two shapes, as tabs above the map. They are mutually exclusive: an area is either a radius or a custom shape, never both.
Simple: radius
A circle around a centre point. Drag the slider or type the number of kilometres; 1 to 500 km.
Specific: custom area
Draw the shape yourself. Click the map to place points, then click the first point to close the shape. After that you can drag points to adjust. Below the map you get the surface area, the number of points and the perimeter.
A circle is rarely what a working area actually looks like. A river, a provincial border, or simply "everything north of the motorway" is captured exactly by a shape, where a radius forces you to choose between covering too much and covering too little.
Travel buffer
Travel buffer
0–120 minutesPer areaExtra minutes Schedulinq adds on top of the normal travel time between two appointments in this area.
Travel time is calculated from distance, not from traffic. In a busy city that calculation is wrong in the same direction every time, and your afternoons run late. Put the minutes you actually lose in here. For a quiet area, leave it at 0.
Managing areas (per professional)
Your areas are on the left, the map on the right. The selected area is dashed; the others are drawn around it as coloured overlays, so you can see at a glance where they overlap and where a gap falls.
The circles on an area card are the assigned professionals. If it says No professionals assigned, that area is empty — it exists, but nobody works it.
Create an area
Click Add area below the list. Give it a name your team will recognise — "North region" beats "Area 2".
Pick a colour
The colour is purely for the map, but it is how you spot overlaps and gaps. Schedulinq suggests one you are not using yet.
Draw the area
The same two tabs as above: radius or custom shape.
Assign professionals
Tick whoever works this area. Someone can belong to several areas.
Switching between the two modes
Going from organisation-wide to per professional is harmless: your existing area stays and you build more alongside it.
The other direction is not.
What a customer outside your area sees
This is the part you never see on your own screen, and therefore the part that surprises people most.
If a customer enters an address outside your area while booking, they do not get an empty list of times — they get an explanation:
Your address falls outside the area [your business name] serves for this service.
Alongside it they get three buttons: enter a different address, choose a different service, or — if they had several services in their basket — remove this one and carry on with the rest.
This is exactly why a too-small service area costs more than it appears to: you do not lose the booking visibly. There is no failed attempt in your system, no notification, no email. The customer reads that you do not come to them and moves on. When in doubt, check the edges of your area once more rather than once less.
Invitations skip the service area
If you invite a customer to pick a time themselves, their address is not checked against your service area. The invitation works even if they live well outside it.
Deliberate: if you invited them, you have already made that call. The service area exists to guard your public booking page, not to overrule you. Just bear in mind that an invitation is therefore not a check — the travel to that customer is on your own estimate.
No times for an at-customer service?
The service area is one of the places availability quietly reaches zero. Check these, in this order:
- Does the customer's address genuinely fall inside the area? Zoom in on the edge — a 15 km radius covers less ground than it looks like on the map.
- Are you in per professional mode? Then the area of one of the staff who perform that service has to cover the address. An area with no professionals assigned produces nothing.
- Does that person work on the days being asked for?
The full diagnosis is in Duration and availability.
Frequently asked questions
Can someone work in more than one area? Yes. Tick them in every area they cover. When booking, it counts if any one of their areas covers the address.
What happens to existing appointments if I shrink my area? Nothing. The service area is only used when searching for new times. Appointments already in the diary stay put.
Are areas allowed to overlap? Yes, and it is often the point — in the overlapping stretch there are simply more people available. The colours on the map show you where that happens.
I do no address-based work at all. Do I need this? No. If all your services take place at a location, your service area plays no part anywhere.