Opening hours — Gorilla Dash

Opening hours do far more than appear on your website. They decide which appointment and order slots customers can book, when deliveries can be made, and how your weekly report splits leads that arrived while you were closed.

Setting the week

Switch on Show Opening Hours, choose 24 Hour or 12 Hour display, and set an Open and Close time for each day. A day left as Closed offers nothing.

Two shortcuts save most of the typing: Copy Monday hours to all weekdays and Copy Saturday hours to Sunday. Both warn you that they overwrite what is there.

Split shifts

Use the + on a day to add a second range — 9 to 1 and 2 to 5, say. The gap becomes unbookable, which is exactly what you want for a lunch closure.

A half-filled row disappears

SET BOTH TIMES OR THE ROW IS DISCARDED

A range with an opening time but no closing time — or the other way round — is silently dropped when you save. No error, no warning, the row simply is not there when you come back. If hours you set will not stick, this is why.

One-off dates

Where your organisation has enabled them, Custom Opening Hours handle public holidays, a late trading night, or a Christmas closure. Each needs a Date and a Name.

A CUSTOM HOUR WITHOUT A NAME IS THROWN AWAY

Both the date and the name are required for the row to survive the save, and again there is no warning. Give every one a name — "Good Friday", "Stocktake" — even when it looks unnecessary.

Custom hours are read by online ordering, but not by appointment booking — so a public holiday closure will not stop somebody booking an appointment that day. Watch the bookings around holidays, or change the regular hours for the period.

Why an empty week distorts your reporting

A TRIBE WITH NO HOURS IS LEFT OUT OF THE AFTER-HOURS FIGURES

The weekly activity report splits leads into those that arrived while you were open and those that arrived while you were shut. A tribe with no hours recorded is skipped from that split entirely — so it looks as though it never misses a lead out of hours. If your network's after-hours numbers look implausibly good, check which tribes have never set their hours.

New tribes start with a nine-to-five weekday week so this does not happen by default. A week deliberately set to closed every day counts as recorded and is left alone.