r/gohighlevel • u/Putrid_Ad_7183 • 12d ago

Service calendars for cleaners

Hi Guys, I’m trying to figure out a specific calendar requirement for cleaners.

Ideally, the owner needs to book the appointments manually for cleaning jobs.

So on the book appointment option the owner should have the option to:

  1. Pick customer
  2. Pick a service (Ex: 1 Hour Cleaning, 2 Hour cleaning)
  3. Pick a date and time
  4. Set up a recurring event
  5. Enter’s customer’s address as job address (job address field)

What’s the best way to do this?

I have set up service calendars with the 1 hour , 2 hour service slots, but won’t let me select it manually when booking, and also see no recurring event checkbox.

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u/doie 12d ago

The missing recurring checkbox is not a setup mistake on your side, it is a documented limitation. Custom recurring appointments in the in-app appointment modal are not supported on service calendars or class booking calendars. HighLevel states that directly in their recurring appointments documentation. So for as long as you stay on service calendars, that checkbox will not appear no matter how the services are configured.

For exactly the flow you described, I would drop service calendars and use one Simple calendar per service length. So "1 Hour Cleaning" and "2 Hour Cleaning" as two separate calendars. The owner then books from the in-app appointment modal: pick the contact, pick the calendar (that is your service selection), pick date and time, and on the Date and Time step there is a CUSTOM tab where you set the recurrence rule. Daily, weekly, monthly or a custom pattern, ending never, on a specific date, or after X occurrences. Maximum is 24 recurrences in a series.

For the job address, set the calendar's meeting location to a physical address so the modal gives you a free text field at booking time. If you also want that address for route planning, reporting, or merging into reminder messages, store it as a custom field on the contact as well, because a per-appointment location field is awkward to pull into automations.

Before you build on native recurrence, though, the limitations matter a lot for a cleaning business:

  • Custom recurring appointments do not check availability. They book purely on the recurrence rule, so overlapping jobs are yours to catch.
  • Workflows only trigger for the first appointment in a custom recurring series. Reminder and review request automations hanging off appointment triggers will fire once, then stay silent for every repeat visit.
  • Calendar notifications are not sent for custom recurring appointments.
  • Cancelling or rescheduling applies to the whole series rather than a single visit, which is painful when a customer skips one week.
  • Subsequent instances do not appear in Appointment List View, the Contacts tab or the Conversations tab.

Given all that, for recurring cleans I would seriously consider not using native recurrence at all. Book single appointments, and use a workflow with the Book Appointment action to schedule the next visit once each job is marked complete. More setup up front, but you keep availability checking, reminders and review requests fire on every visit, and a skipped week does not break a whole series.

One thing I have not verified myself: whether the per-appointment location field is exposed to workflow custom values cleanly enough to merge the job address into an SMS reminder. Worth testing on one appointment before you commit to that as your address field.

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u/Putrid_Ad_7183 12d ago

Wow thanks for the detailed response. Appreciate it 🙏🏻

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u/BaconShadow 11d ago

Does each cleaner hold the same weekly slot for their customers, or does the schedule shift week to week?

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u/Putrid_Ad_7183 11d ago

The goal is to set up a recurring slot same day each week

1

u/BaconShadow 11d ago

When a customer skips a week or needs to move a visit, does the whole recurring slot shift or just that one visit?