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Think of availability as your chosen working hours! They help us to know when you're available so we can recommend you to students and send you students who have availability that matches up with yours.

Your overall availability is your chosen working hours, with all other events subtracted. These 'other events' are either sessions on Sherpa, or events synced from your external calendar.

This means your availability on Sherpa accurately reflects when you're available for introductions or bookings on Sherpa.

When a student goes to make a booking with you, they can see the times that you're available, rather than you having to send your availability through the messages page.

This massively helps to remove back-and-forth with figuring out what times work for an introduction or booking.

As a tutor on Sherpa, you have your own 'Scheduling' page. As mentioned above, this is used on your calendar page, to allow students to book in with you when you're free.

Students and parents see your calendar from your profile when they want to request an introduction or book a lesson. This includes current students who are requesting a new booking:

The more up-to-date your availability, the more likely it is you'll receive introduction and booking requests from students whose schedule matches up with yours, and you're available to teach. It'll also allow you to quickly accept new introduction requests - massively increasing the chances you'll convert these into bookings.

To allow you a reasonable amount of time to respond - we do not let students request a time that is less than 3 hours in the future. If a student contacts you in a message and you are quickly available, feel free to override this by creating your own introduction request.

You can override your availability when making a session request from your end if you need. This can be useful if you've synced an external event that you no longer need to attend.

Properly setting up your availability is one of the most important things you need to do with your profile on Sherpa. You only need to take 2 simple steps.

1. Add Your Working Hours

First, just set your desired working hours through your Availability Page. In the above example, this tutor wants to teach on Monday and Tuesday afternoons/evenings, and during the day on Saturdays and Sundays.

2. Sync Your External Calendars

You can sync Google Calendars and Outlook Calendars to remove external events from your availability. For the example above, the tutor may have an in-person lesson that they teach on a Saturday morning from 10am to 11am. They've already got this in their personal Google Calendar.

When this tutor syncs their Google Calendar, 10am to 11am will show as unavailable in their calendar.

The full guide on how to do this is here.

3. Add Manual Exceptions (Optional)

You can also add manual exceptions directly through Sherpa. If you'd like to block out longer periods of time (e.g. a week, to reflect a holiday), you can add exceptions directly in Sherpa.

Sherpa is a fantastic platform that allows you to easily onboard external students in order to manage your availability, bookings, payments, classroom and notes all in one place. By going to your dashboard, you are able to copy a link directly to your calendar:

You can send this onto any student, who will be on-boarded to Sherpa for you. They are able to book in for an introduction or send a booking request directly from the calendar link too!

There's currently a limitation with syncing Work or Professional email addresses on Sherpa. You can only sync personal Outlook email addresses for the time being.

2. Some of my Google Calendar events aren't syncing

Currently, Sherpa only syncs your 'Primary' Google Calendar - i.e. the one labelled with your name in the left-hand bar.

If this doesn't fit your use case - please get in touch!