Google Calendar

Each team member who takes appointments can connect one Google account. Two things happen once they do:

• Busy time in Google blocks bookings. Events in the Google calendars they pick close those times on your booking page, and the appointment form warns when you book over them. The agenda shows them as Busy (Google).
• Appointments appear in Google. CalGest creates a calendar called CalGest in their Google account and keeps their appointments in it. New bookings, changes and cancellations show up within a minute or two.

Google Calendar is available on every plan.

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Connecting

On the web, open your account page (your name in the sidebar, then Account) and select Connect Google Calendar. On the phone, go to Settings, tap Google Calendar, then Connect Google Calendar: the phone opens CalGest in your browser, where you sign in with Google. When you’re done, go back to the app; the connection shows up there by itself. If the browser isn’t signed in to CalGest, sign in first. Google then asks you to sign in and to allow three things: seeing the list of your calendars, seeing the events in them, and managing the calendars CalGest creates. CalGest can’t change or delete anything in your other Google calendars. You connect your own calendar. If a team member has no CalGest login, someone with permission to edit team members can connect it from that person’s page in Team, signing in with that person’s Google account.

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Choosing calendars

Right after connecting, your main Google calendar blocks bookings. To change that, tick or untick calendars under Calendars that block bookings. You can pick up to 10, including calendars other people share with you. An event blocks the time unless one of these applies:

• It is marked Free in Google. All-day events like birthdays are usually free.
• You declined the invitation.
• It is a working location entry (“Working from home”).

All-day events block the whole day in the Google calendar’s own timezone. To work out busy time, CalGest asks Google for each event’s id, status, start and end, whether it is marked free, its type and the recurring series it belongs to. For every guest it asks only whether that guest is you and how they replied, so it can skip events you declined, and it asks for the event’s private properties, so it can skip its own events. It never asks for titles, descriptions, guests’ names or emails, or places, so nobody in CalGest can see what your personal events are. All of this is used during the sync and not stored: CalGest keeps only the busy times (start, end, all day or not, and the event ids), and a daily job deletes each one once it ended more than a day ago. Busy time works like time off. It closes the slot for online booking and for group sessions on the booking page. When staff book over it, they see a warning, not a block.

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What appointments look like in Google

Each appointment in the CalGest calendar shows:

• the service, or several services joined with ”+”
• the customer’s first name, unless your organization chose Service only
• the location
• a link that opens the appointment in CalGest

Group sessions show the service and the number of places taken, such as “Yoga · 4/8”, never the participants’ names. Booking requests that are still pending start with “Pending:”. Phone numbers, email addresses, notes and custom fields are never sent to Google. The customer is never added as a guest, so Google never emails them. Edits you make to these events in Google don’t come back to CalGest. The next change in CalGest overwrites them. To stop sending appointments without disconnecting, turn off Add CalGest appointments to Google. That deletes the CalGest calendar from Google.

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Choosing what Google sees

Owners and admins decide, for the whole organization, what CalGest events in Google say about the customer. Go to Settings > General > Google Calendar and choose:

• Service and the customer’s first name, for example “Haircut · Ana”. This is the default.
• Service only, for example “Haircut”.

Changing this rewrites the events already in Google.

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Disconnecting

Select Disconnect on the Google Calendar card. CalGest then:

• deletes the CalGest calendar from your Google account
• stops reading your calendars, so their busy time no longer blocks bookings
• removes its access to your Google account, unless the same account is connected in another CalGest organization

CalGest disconnects on its own when a team member stops taking appointments, is deactivated or removed, loses their login or deletes their account, and when the organization is deleted.

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When syncing stops

If Google stops accepting the connection, the card and the agenda ask you to Reconnect. This happens when you change your Google password, remove CalGest from your Google account’s security settings, or leave it unused for a long time. Until you reconnect, the busy time CalGest already had keeps blocking bookings for about a week (7 days, cleared by a daily job). If someone deletes the CalGest calendar in Google, CalGest creates a new one and adds the appointments back.

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Privacy

Your Google account belongs to your business. CalGest puts only the details above in it. What CalGest keeps about the connection:

• the Google account’s id and email address, the permissions you gave, and a sign-in token stored encrypted
• the calendars you chose, with their names and timezones
• the busy times described above, until a day after each ends
• for each appointment it put in Google, the Google event id, for a year after the appointment ends, so changes and erasures reach the event

When a connection needs reconnecting, its busy times are kept for 7 days. A daily job then deletes them, so they are gone within about 8 days. When you disconnect, CalGest first deletes the CalGest calendar in Google, then everything above, and withdraws its access to your Google account only after that. Usually this takes minutes. If Google is unreachable, CalGest keeps trying for as long as it takes. If Google refuses for good, for example because you removed CalGest’s access yourself while the CalGest calendar was still there, CalGest stops, keeps what it needs to finish, and alerts the CalGest team. If you connect the same Google account to the same team member again, CalGest picks the old connection back up: it keeps the existing CalGest calendar and its appointments instead of making a second one. A different Google account leaves the old cleanup to finish once Google allows it. You can also delete the CalGest calendar in Google yourself. When a customer asks to be erased, CalGest removes their name from their events in Google within that one-year window. Copies older than that stay in Google, and your business can delete them there.