Bookable Hours & Gap Tracker Spreadsheet
A spreadsheet that separates the empty hours in your diary somebody could have been booked into from the ones that were never sellable to anybody.
Utilisation tells you how much of the day was booked and never what shape the rest of it was in. Twenty minutes between two appointments is not lost time you can win back — it is time that was never sellable, and there is usually half an hour of it in every diary, every day.
What is in it
- Setup — three numbers, and the first one decides everything else.
- People — 20 rows, one per practitioner, chair or room.
- Appointments — 2,000 rows, six things per booking.
- By Person — sellable gaps and dead minutes kept apart, with a sentence on each row.
- By Day Of Week — where in the week the holes actually are.
- Overview — the whole quarter on one screen, plus a Start Here tab saying where to type.
Who it is for
Anything booked in slots against a person or a room: a salon, a barber, a dentist, a clinic, a driving instructor, a tattoo studio, a garage bay, a meeting room. You need a diary export with six columns — date, practitioner, start, end, what it was and the price — sorted by practitioner, then date, then start time, and there is a column that checks each row in case it slipped.
The worked example
A worked quarter is filled in: 3 people, 1,625 appointments, 1,560 hours open and 1,143 booked. That is 73.3% full against a 75.0% target, taking $93,014, or $81.37 a booked hour.
Of the 417 open hours nobody booked, 221 sat in 327 gaps long enough to sell — worth $17,962, which is 19.3% of everything taken. The other 71 hours were 282 gaps too short to sell to anybody: 23 dead minutes a day, per person. Keeping the room warm, lit, insured and staffed through all of that cost a further $8,755.
How it works
Compatible with Microsoft Excel 2016 or newer on Windows or Mac, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice. No macros, no add-ons, no account to create, nothing to install.
The download has two workbooks: one with the example above already filled in, so you can see what every column expects, and the same file completely blank for your own figures. A plain-English guide comes as a PDF. Order on WhatsApp — $9
Orders are taken on WhatsApp: message me and I’ll send the payment details, then the files as soon as the payment is confirmed.
A look inside the file
Questions people actually ask
How do I work out how much money is sitting in the gaps in my diary?
You tell the file the shortest appointment you could actually sell, and it splits every unbooked stretch of the day into gaps somebody could have been booked into and gaps too short to sell to anybody. In the worked quarter that was 327 sellable gaps — 221 hours worth $17,962, or 19.3% of everything the business took — against 282 fifteen-minute gaps worth nothing to anyone, ever. A utilisation figure of 73.3% booked never shows you that split, because it treats both kinds of empty hour as the same thing.
Is this only for clinics?
No — it works for anything booked in slots against a person or a room: a salon, a barber, a dentist, a driving instructor, a tattoo studio, a garage bay, a meeting room. The People tab holds 20 rows, one per practitioner, chair or room, and Appointments holds 2,000 bookings. Two people can be equally full — 73.6% and 74.8% booked — and lose 28 and 22 dead minutes a day, which are two completely different conversations.
Where do I get the appointment list?
Export the diary out of whatever you book with: date, practitioner, start, end, what it was and the price — six columns, paste and sort. A quarter is plenty. It must be sorted by practitioner, then date, then start time, because every gap depends on it, so there is a column that checks each row and a count that tells you if the sort has slipped. Leave no-shows and cancellations out and the time shows up as a gap, which is exactly what it was; if you charged for one, put it in at the price you actually took.
Does it work in Google Sheets or do I need Excel?
Both — it is built as .xlsx for Excel 2016 or newer on Windows or Mac, and it loads into Google Sheets through File then Import then Upload. LibreOffice opens it too. There are no macros, no add-ons, no account to create, nothing to install and no subscription: you download the file and it is yours.
Will it fill my diary for me?
No — it is not a booking, diary or reminder system, not a rota or staff scheduling package, and not connected to anything, so nothing syncs and nothing logs in. It tells you which empty hours somebody could have been put into, which ones were never going to be sold, and what each is costing you — in the worked quarter 417 unbooked hours cost $8,755 just to keep the room warm, lit, insured and cleaned. I never ask for a password, your booking system or your records; you download a file and that is the whole transaction.
Need it built around your business?
This one assumes appointments booked against a person or a room in one location, with a price on each booking. If yours is different — a practitioner who has to move between two rooms, treatments that need a machine free as well as a person, or a diary where the travel between calls has to count as booked time — I can build the same gap arithmetic around how you actually book.
All other templates are listed on the Excel & Google Sheets Templates page.