In this article, you will learn how to create custom availability schedules for your technicians in Workiz, giving you control over exactly when each technician can be scheduled for jobs.

By default, your technicians' availability follows your standard business hours.

On occasion, though, certain technicians may work hours that differ from your standard business hours — different days of the week, different times of day, or some other variation entirely.

Workiz allows you to customize availability on a per-technician basis, so you're always assigning the right technician to the right job at the right time. This takes the guesswork out of scheduling for your dispatchers, and helps prevent the kind of mistakes that lead to last-minute rescheduling.

Customizing the availability for your techs

For each technician, you can fine-tune their availability to match exactly how they work:

• Turn off availability for a specific day: If a technician doesn't work a certain day at all (e.g., they're off every Wednesday), you can disable availability for that day entirely. 
• Modify the hours within a specific day:  If a technician's hours differ from your standard business hours (e.g., they start later or end earlier), you can adjust the start and end times for that day. 
• Add individual working slots within a day: If a technician works split shifts, you can add multiple availability windows within the same day. For example, a technician might be available from 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM, unavailable for a few hours, then available again from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Adding separate slots ensures they're only shown as available during their actual working windows.

1. From the top navigation bar, select your profile icon > Manage team
2. Select the technician whose availability you want to customize
3. Select the Availability tab
   
4. Turn the toggle for User availability same as business hours off
   
5. Modify their availability as desired
   
   1. Make them available or unavailable for entire days of the week
   2. Make them available or unavailable for specific times of the day
   3. Make them available or unavailable for specific slots within specific days 

How custom tech availabilities affect your Workiz experience

Once you've set up custom availability for your technicians, Workiz automatically references those settings anywhere technician scheduling comes into play — helping you avoid assigning jobs to technicians who aren't actually available to take them.

Manual job assignment

When assigning a job, Workiz checks each technician's qualifications — matching job type and matching service area — to determine who's eligible for the job. Technicians who meet both of these criteria will appear in the list of assignable technicians.

From there, Workiz also checks their availability settings. If a qualified technician is outside of their working hours for that job's date and time, they'll still appear in the list, but with a label next to their name indicating they're unavailable — for example, noting that the job falls outside their set working hours.

This is intended to guide scheduling decisions, not block them entirely. If you need to assign a job under special circumstances, you can manually override the availability label and assign the technician anyway. Workiz will not systematically prevent you from making that assignment — the label is there to inform the decision, not enforce it.

Online booking and Genius Answering

If your online booking and/or Genius Answering settings are configured to honor technicians' real-time availability, custom availability schedules will also apply there. Any time blocked off for a technician — whether a full day off or a specific unavailable window — will not appear as a bookable time slot in online booking. Customers booking online will only see time slots when at least one qualified technician is actually available.

Schedule view

Custom availability is also reflected visually on the schedule. Any time a technician is marked unavailable — whether for a full day or a specific window — Workiz displays a block on their schedule to represent that unavailability. For example, if a technician is unavailable from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM on Tuesdays, you'll see that block directly on their schedule for that time.

As with manual job assignment, this is informational rather than restrictive — you can still schedule over that block if needed, but the visual indicator is there to help you make an informed decision at a glance.