Control availability: buffers, booking notice, safety stock, overbooking and downtime

Six dials sit between your stock and what a customer can book. They all shrink availability, but they shrink it for different reasons. Here is what each one does and when to use it.

Prep and turnaround buffers

Every rental actually occupies a longer window than the dates on the order. You need time to prep totes before they go out and time to clean and restage them when they come back. The pool's Prep days and Turnaround days add that time: a rental from the 3rd to the 10th with 1 prep day and 1 turnaround day blocks stock from the 2nd through the 11th.

The defaults for new pools live at Settings › Rental period › Buffer times, in the fields Prep days ("Days before a rental to prepare it") and Turnaround days ("Days after a rental to clean and restage it"). Both run 0 to 30 days, and only an owner or manager can change them. Changing them never touches existing pools; they apply to new products only. Each pool can still be tuned individually on its Product Details page.

Set these to match your real operation, not your hopes. Zero means back-to-back rentals with no slack, which works only if cleaning and restaging genuinely take no time. When a booking lands uncomfortably close to the last one, buffers are usually the first dial to question.

Online safety stock

Sometimes you want a cushion your website never sees. The Online safety stock field on a pool's Product Details page, under Settings, holds a number of units back from online checkout. The storefront then shows available stock minus the cushion, and staff can still book the held-back units from intake. Set it to 0 and the cushion disappears entirely.

Use it when walk-ins, phone orders, or your best repeat customers would suffer if the website sold the last tote. If the field is at or above everything in stock at the location, the page tells you plainly that nothing sells online there.

When an intake order dips into the cushion, the availability row shows an amber note, "Uses X of N safety-stock units." It is a note, not a block. Intake, the availability calendar, and the confidence chip all keep showing the raw numbers, so your team sees the full picture while customers see a smaller one.

Overbooking policy

Each pool has an Overbooking setting on Product Details (office role or higher). Three modes:

• Never. A draft that goes past availability cannot be saved, even with an override. Use this for pools where an overbook would be a real promise you can't keep.
• Manual only. The default. Saving a draft past availability needs an office-role override with a written reason, recorded on the order's activity. Holding and confirming still enforce real availability.
• Up to N. Lets hold, confirm, and end-date changes commit up to N units past availability per pool, per location, per window. Set the limit between 1 and 9,999. Use it when you reliably pull in extra stock on demand, or when a slightly oversold pool costs less than turning business away.

The storefront never uses the N allowance. Online checkout refuses a stock-out the same way it always did.

Scheduled downtime

Downtime takes a quantity of one pool out of availability at one location for a date range, without writing anything off. Open the pool, go to the Downtime section, and choose Schedule downtime. Enter the Quantity, a Reason (maintenance, repair, cleaning, inspection, or other), the First day out and Last day out. Cancelling the window puts the stock straight back.

Use downtime for the honest reasons a pool is not rentable: a batch at the wash, a damaged set awaiting repair, units set aside for a photo shoot. It is the one subtraction from availability that is not a promise to a customer, and it is the first place to look when the numbers feel wrong.

The manual override

When a pool is set to Manual only and a booking matters more than the math, you can still save the draft past availability. This is the override: it takes an office-level role and a written reason, and it is recorded as an `availability_override` event on the order's activity feed. It gets the draft saved; the hold and confirm steps still check real balances before they commit.

Use it sparingly and write a real reason. "Customer confirmed they will return the other set Tuesday" is a reason. "Felt like it" is not, and it will read that way in the activity log forever.

Minimum booking notice

The last dial is the window between booking and start date. To stop same-day or next-day surprises from your storefront:

1. Open Settings, then Preferences, then Last-minute bookings.

2. Tick Prevent last-minute bookings.

3. Set Minimum notice to a number and pick the Unit: Hours or Days.

4. Save.

This applies to new online bookings only. Your team can still book a closer date from the dashboard when it makes sense, so write the cutoff into your delivery and pickup policy too, and train the team on it.

When availability still looks wrong

• The calendar shows zero but the shelf is full. Check the cushions in order: downtime, prep and turnaround buffers, safety stock, and overlapping holds and bookings. One of them is holding the stock.
• A pool refuses to sell online but staff can book it. That is Online safety stock doing exactly what it was built for. Lower the cushion if it is wrong, and leave it alone if it is right.
• An override saved the draft but the hold was refused. Expected. The override covers the draft gate; the hold re-checks real balances inside the transaction. Something moved between the two, or the policy is Never.