How StretchSchedule Works: Event Types, Availability, and Bookings

Before you configure anything, it helps to understand the handful of concepts StretchSchedule is built on. Once these click, every feature in the app makes sense.

The four building blocks

1. Event types (meeting links) An event type is a reusable definition of a meeting: its name, duration, location, color, the questions invitees answer, and the rules that govern it. Each event type has a public slug and its own booking page. Think of an event type as a template — Intro Call, 60-min Strategy Session, Team Demo — that you can share over and over.

Event types come in four modes:
- One-on-one — you and one invitee.
- Group — many invitees share a single slot (a webinar or workshop).
- Collective — several hosts must all be free and attend together (a panel interview).
- Round-robin — bookings are distributed across a team so load is shared.

2. Availability Availability schedules define when you can meet. Each schedule has a timezone and weekly windows (for example, Mon–Fri 9–5). You can keep multiple schedules — one for sales calls, another for deep-work office hours — and mark one as the default. Date overrides handle exceptions: block a holiday, open a special Saturday, or set custom hours for a single day.

3. Bookings A booking is a specific scheduled meeting created against an event type — it has an invitee, a start and end time, a location, and a status (scheduled, rescheduled, completed, cancelled, or no-show). Bookings are the running record of everything on your calendar inside StretchSchedule.

4. Contacts StretchSchedule builds a contacts view automatically from the people who book with you, grouped by email. You don't maintain it by hand — it's a by-product of real bookings.

How availability becomes open slots

When someone opens your booking page, the app computes open slots by combining:

Your schedule's weekly windows.
Any date overrides that apply.
Buffers before and after existing meetings.
Existing bookings (so you're never double-booked).
Minimum notice (too-soon times are hidden) and the booking window (too-far-ahead times are hidden).

The result is a clean list of genuinely bookable times, shown in the invitee's local timezone.

The public booking flow

Here's what happens when a stranger books with you — no login required on their side:

They open your page at /public/schedule/<slug>.
The app loads the event type's public-safe details and your branding.
They pick a duration (if you offer several) and a slot.
They fill in their name, email, and any questions you added.
On submit, StretchSchedule re-checks availability at write time. If the slot was taken in the meantime, the booking is rejected so two people can't grab the same time.
The booking is created and stamped with an unguessable key that powers the invitee's private reschedule/cancel link.

Tenant safety, briefly

StretchSchedule is multi-tenant. Inside your workspace you only ever see your own organization's data. Public booking pages are reachable by anyone with the link, but they expose only that one event type's public-safe fields and open slots — a stranger can never enumerate or reach another organization's information.

A worked example

Acme Consulting sets up two event types:
- Discovery Call (one-on-one, 30 min, uses the "Sales hours" schedule).
- Quarterly Review (collective, 60 min, requires both the account manager and an engineer).

A prospect books a Discovery Call for Thursday 11:00. The app checks Sales-hours windows, sees no conflicting bookings and a 2-hour buffer is respected, and confirms. The prospect appears under Contacts, and the meeting shows in Bookings as scheduled.

Tips

Model your meetings as event types first. Most questions about "how do I do X" resolve to "create the right event type."
Reuse schedules across event types instead of rebuilding hours each time.
Let contacts build themselves — don't try to pre-load them.

FAQ

Do invitees need an account? No. Booking pages are public; only you (the host) sign in.

Can one availability schedule power many event types? Yes — that's the intended design. Point several event types at the same schedule.

What's the difference between a group and a collective event type? Group = many invitees, one host, one shared slot. Collective = one invitee, multiple hosts who must all be available.