Welcome to Calendly! đź‘‹
We’ve put together a few simple steps for you to set up your account and book your first meeting. This should take about 30 minutes.
We’ll walk you through the following steps:
🏗 Account setup
- Set up your profile
- Connect your calendar
- Add video conferencing
đź—“ Scheduling setup
- Create your schedule
- Edit your event type
- Share your availability
Let’s jump in!
Step 1: Set up your profile
Let's head over to your Account Settings page.
Under Profile, you can update your photo, name and welcome message, which will show on your booking page when people schedule with you. Think of your booking page as a first introduction with your invitees.
đź’ˇTips:
- Photo: Some users use their LinkedIn photo, to keep their branding uniform.
- Name: Feel free to add your role or company to your name, like “Lisa from Calendly.”
- Welcome message: Your message will show on your booking page above all your event types.
Under the My link section, you can view your Calendly link that you can share for bookings.
You can change your link from the provided one, but just make sure not to change it once you’ve shared your link with invitees.
Step 2: Connect your calendar
Connecting your calendar is a key part of scheduling. When you connect your calendar, Calendly can:
- Accurately show your availability
- Prevent overlapping meetings
- Consider meetings outside of Calendly
- Add events to your calendar
Connecting your calendar
To connect your calendar, navigate to your Calendar Connections page. You can connect any of the following calendar platforms:
Select + Add Calendar Account to connect your calendar. If you already see a calendar connected, you may have already connected it during your sign-up process.
With your calendar connected, Calendly will automatically display your available times on your booking page—no need to manually check your calendar for availability!
Adding events to your calendar
You can connect multiple calendars to your account, but Calendly can only add scheduled events to one calendar. You can choose which calendar that is under Add to Calendar, then select Edit.
No calendar?
If you don’t want to connect a calendar, you can manually enter your availability in Calendly from the Availability page. However, this is a bit more work, since Calendly won't be automatically syncing your availability from your calendar.
Step 3: Add video conferencing
Let’s check out the Integrations page.
You’ll see lots of integrations on this page, from analytics tools to scheduling extensions. Let's focus specifically on an important part of the meeting process: video conferencing.
You can connect with the following video conferencing options:
- Zoom
- Google Meet
- Microsoft Teams Conferencing
- Webex
- GoTo Meeting
Adding video conferencing
On the Integrations page, select your video conferencing platform and log in. In this Zoom example, your page will look something like this after connecting Zoom:
Once connected, make sure to go to your event types where you'll be using videoconferencing, and choose your videoconferencing platform as the location. We'll also go over this in Step 5: Edit your event type.
đź’ˇTip:
- You don't have to select just one location—you can connect with multiple video conferencing platforms to give your invitees options.
Now that you've completed your account setup, let's move on the scheduling set up, so invitees are ready to book with you!
Step 4: Create your schedule
Calendly looks at your availability from two main places to calculate when you can accept new meetings:
- Your connected calendar, like Google, Outlook, etc.
- Your Calendly schedule
In this step, we'll build out a Calendly schedule to tailor your available hours. It's a good idea to set up a schedule if you want to limit your availability on certain days, or only take meetings during certain windows. In other words, schedules let you narrow down when people can make bookings.
Creating a schedule
Let’s go to the Availability page. Here, you can create a new schedule or edit your default hours.
Setting unavailable hours
You’ll notice that you can remove hours from some days or block entire days altogether. If you want to remove a day, you can deselect it, or use the trash icon.
In this case, we’ve marked Friday as unavailable, since we don’t want to accept any meetings on Friday.
Adding time intervals
You can also add more time intervals if you want to accept meetings during a specific time period each day:
Once you're happy with your schedule, you can apply your schedule to any event types that need these times.
Date override
If there are hours or days that don't adhere to your usual schedule, you can set a date override. Date overrides are for times that don’t follow a pattern, like holidays or days you know you won’t be in office.
đź’ˇTip:
- You can create as many schedules as you like, and apply them to different event types.
Questions? These resources may help:
Step 5: Edit your event type
On your Home page, you’ll notice a pre-built event type with a set duration. You can think of an event type as a meeting that you’ll schedule regularly, like a product demo, a customer call, or office hours.
You can choose to:
Creating a new event type
On your Home page, select + Create. Select Event type.
From here, you’ll see a few different options:
The most popular option is the one-on-one, so let’s select that for now.
Next, let’s customize your event type (you can skip the Editing an existing event type section below).
Editing an existing event type
Let’s go ahead and edit an event type to meet your scheduling needs (don’t worry, you can edit the title and duration in the next step).
To edit an existing event type, go to your Home page and click into an event type.
Customizing your event type
In the What event is this? section, you can set the:
- Event name
- Location
- Description
If you’ve already connected a video conferencing platform, you’ll want to choose it as your location:
đź’ˇTip:
-
You can let your invitee pick how you meet by adding multiple location options.
In the When can people book this event? section, you can set your booking preferences.
We’ll point out a few important settings:
- Duration: Choose how long your event will be.
- Schedule or custom hours: You can pull in the schedule you set up in Step 4, or create custom hours. Custom hours are useful if you want hours that differ from what you’ve built so far.
- Buffers: You can add time before and after meetings to build in breaks.
Invitee questions
Another feature to point out is the Invitee questions section, where you can add up to 10 questions to your booking page. This is useful if you want to gather more information about your invitee.
There are a lot more settings within the event type, but we’ll focus on these for now. We recommend taking a look at the additional rules for your availability, if you’d like to:
- Limit daily bookings
- Prevent last-minute bookings
- Set the frequency of available times
View your booking page
Now that you’ve made all these changes, let’s see what your booking page looks like! Within your event type, select View live page. This is the page your invitees will see when you send them your Calendly link.
đź’ˇTip:
- If you’re noticing any availability issues, it’s a good idea to select the Troubleshoot tool at the bottom of the page, to understand how your availability is shown.
Questions? These resources may help:
The second option is to share your event link, if you want your invitee to book a specific event type. You can access it from the Share button on your event types:
When you select Share, you have the option to:
- Share a link: Creates a link for that event, for you to share with your invitee.
- Add times to email: Copies the times you choose, which you can add in an email.
- Add to your website: Creates code, so you can add your booking page to your website. To view more examples, check out these embedded Calendly booking pages.
Bonus step: Download the Calendly extension
If you’d like to share your Calendly links from any web page or from your inbox, then Calendly extensions are a great scheduling shortcut.
From your extension, you’ll see all the events you’ve created. You can share links, create one-off meetings, and share your availability—from any web page. You can also share links directly from your Gmail toolbar, so you don’t need to leave your email.
The Calendly extensions work with Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Outlook, and LinkedIn.
Questions? These resources may help:
What’s next?
Thanks for following along!
Calendly has a ton of additional functionality, from meeting polls to Workflows.
To keep exploring and learning about Calendly, check out the following:
