Write the interval on paper first
Suppose a fictional appointment starts at 10:00, lasts forty minutes, needs ten minutes of preparation and fifteen minutes of reset. The occupied interval runs from 09:50 to 10:55 for any resource required throughout that span. The customer may still see a forty-minute service. This arithmetic is our planning example, not a statement about how every scheduler applies buffers to every resource. Identify which person, room or asset each interval actually occupies.
Avoid double counting by accident
If preparation can happen while another employee finishes a previous appointment, a single all-resource buffer may be conservative. If the same room is needed for cleanup, ignoring reset time is unsafe operationally. Decide which simplification you are making and why. The worksheet on this site deliberately uses a full-cycle assumption. It provides a planning bound for identical appointments, not an optimal timetable with overlapping preparation stages.
Check both ends of the day
A buffer can affect the first booking as well as the last. Calculate whether preparation begins before staff or the location is available, and whether reset ends after the allowed working period. Do not fix a missing slot by reducing a real operational requirement. Instead check the working hours, booking start and buffer assumptions together. A slot that appears only after removing necessary cleanup time is not additional usable capacity.
Use a pairwise acceptance case
Place two fictional appointments close together and state the minimum acceptable gap. Test the boundary exactly, then one step inside it. Also test a different service that shares the room but has another duration. This exposes whether the rule is service-specific or inadvertently dependent on only one appointment type. Before changing production settings, inspect affected future bookings and decide who will resolve any commitments that no longer fit the revised interval.
Sources used for this page
These records support the facts and comparisons above. Merchant-controlled records are labelled so you can separate product claims from independent evidence.
- Trafft service configuration — Merchant documentation · trafft.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-23
- Trafft booking settings — Merchant documentation · trafft.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-23