Slot rules are the single most important thing you configure in Treatlly. Everything downstream — what patients can book, what your front desk can offer, what appears on your website — comes from them.
The idea is simple: you do not create appointments one by one. You describe the shape of a doctor's week once, and Treatlly generates the bookable slots from it, forward in time.
Rule versus slot
| What it is | |
|---|---|
| Slot rule | Your description of a recurring pattern: this doctor, these days, these sessions, this consultation length, these quotas. |
| Slot | An actual bookable appointment on an actual date, generated from the rule. |
Change the rule and future slots regenerate. Patients already booked are left alone — their appointments are not rewritten underneath them.
What a rule contains
- Doctor — rules belong to one doctor.
- Location — which of your places this applies to.
- Days — which days of the week the doctor consults.
- Sessions — the blocks within a day, e.g. 10:00–13:00 and 17:00–20:00.
- Consultation length — how long one appointment takes, which decides how many fit in a session.
- Quotas — how the seats are split between online and the counter.
- Consultation mode — walk-in or video consultation.
Quotas — the setting that causes most problems
Each session has a capacity, and you decide how it is divided:
- Online quota — seats the internet may book.
- Counter quota — seats reserved for your front desk.
Set the online quota too high and a busy morning fills online, leaving your front desk unable to fit the patient standing in front of them. Set it too low and your booking page looks empty while the doctor has space.
Most clinics start conservative — a modest online quota — and raise it once they trust the flow. It is a one-field change.
Video consultation slots are online-only
If you set a rule's mode to video consultation, its counter quota is forced to zero and the field is disabled. This is deliberate and cannot be overridden: a patient has to accept the video-consultation agreement themselves, and only they can do that, so the booking has to come from them.
A front desk trying to book one anyway gets "Counter booking is full for this slot" even though the slot looks empty.
Separate video sessions from walk-in sessions
A doctor cannot be in a video call and in front of a patient at the same time. Give video its own block of time rather than mixing modes in one session.
Also remember a video room stays open until 40 minutes after the scheduled time, so very short slots will overlap in practice.
Holidays
Do not delete a rule to close for a day. Mark the closure under Holidays instead: the affected slots are removed and any patients already booked are flagged for reschedule rather than silently dropped.
Changing a rule later
Editing a rule regenerates future slots. Existing bookings are preserved, so you can safely adjust quotas as you learn your pattern.
What you should not do is make large structural changes — different days, very different timings — the evening before a busy clinic. Make them with a few days of clear air.
Common symptoms and their cause
| Symptom | Usual cause |
|---|---|
| Booking page shows no slots | Online quota is zero, or no rule covers those days. |
| Front desk cannot book, slot looks empty | Counter quota exhausted — or it is a video slot, which is online-only. |
| Slots stop after a certain date | Slots are generated a period ahead; they extend as time passes. |
| Doctor says the timing is wrong | Session timings in the rule; check with the doctor and edit. |
| Patients booked on a closed day | The closure was not marked under Holidays. |