Connecting Google & Outlook
Connect each staff member's calendar and two things start happening automatically: their existing busy times block WhenTap slots, and every new booking is added to their calendar with the customer's details. It is a two-way sync, and it works with Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook.
Connecting a calendar is per staff member, so each person links their own.
How to connect
- Open Staff in the panel and click a staff member to open their availability.
- Under Calendar sync, click Google Calendar or Outlook.
- A new tab opens where you sign in and approve access. When it finishes you will see a confirmation, and the panel updates to show the calendar as connected.
After connecting you will see: "Your Google calendar is linked. WhenTap will block your busy times and add new bookings here automatically." (Outlook shows the same for Outlook.)
What syncing does
Reads busy times. When WhenTap works out which slots are free, it also reads the staff member's calendar for that window and treats their existing events as busy. Those times are removed from the widget, so no one can book over an appointment that already exists elsewhere.
Writes new bookings. When a booking is confirmed, WhenTap creates an event on the staff member's calendar titled "Service — Customer name", with the customer's email in the description and the exact start and end time. If the booking is later rescheduled, the event moves; if it is cancelled, the event is deleted.
If a calendar is briefly unreachable, WhenTap does not block the booking, it simply skips the calendar step and carries on. A flaky calendar never takes your widget down.
A note on timezones
Availability is always computed in the staff member's own timezone and converted to exact moments in time, so a calendar in one timezone and a customer in another line up correctly. Daylight-saving changes are handled per calendar date, not by a fixed offset. See How booking works.
Security
Calendar access tokens are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and refreshed automatically shortly before they expire, so a connected calendar keeps working without you re-authorizing. You can disconnect a calendar at any time from the same panel.
Reconnecting
If a token is ever revoked on the calendar provider's side, syncing for that staff member stops and you will need to reconnect from their availability panel. Everything else keeps working in the meantime.