How your Sunix setup decides what patients can book online, and how to get the result you want.
This guide is for practices on Sunix Vision. For the equivalent on Optomate Touch, see your setup guide — the ideas are the same but the screens differ.
The key idea: Your Booking doesn't keep its own calendar. Every time it shows a patient which times are open, it reads them live from Sunix. So the way to control online booking is to get your Sunix appointment book set up the way you want, and then point Your Booking at it. Almost every "why is that showing online?" question comes back to how the day is configured in Sunix.
Three things in Sunix combine to decide what a patient sees online:
Get those three right and the online booking page will mirror your practice.
Each optometrist's availability in Sunix is made up of template slots and inserted slots — the template slots set up for each weekday, plus any slots generated or added in the appointment book. Your Booking reads those slots live and offers them to patients. A few things follow from that:
Locum diaries and one-off slots. Your Booking works out an optometrist's availability from their own template plus any Avai appointments in their appointment book. Two Sunix actions create Avai appointments directly:
Booking part of a slot keeps the rest available. If a patient books an appointment shorter than an available slot, Your Booking books it and automatically keeps the unused time before and after it available too — so nothing is stranded, even for a stand-alone slot with no template behind it (a locum's Create Empty Slots diary, or a one-off Insert slot). You'll see the remaining time stay bookable, and it appears as a fresh available appointment in Sunix.
To close a day or part of a day, mark that time as Not Available in the appointment book.
Select the appointment (or the empty slot) you want to close and press Status F7 to change its status. For an open slot the status cycles Avai → Mayb → N/A → Avai, so press it until it reads N/A (Not Available). Your Booking treats anything that isn't Avai as unavailable and won't offer it.
Important — the most common mistake: if that all-day appointment is left as Avai (Available) instead of N/A, Your Booking treats the whole block as open and will book patients into it — shrinking it to the length of their appointment and leaving the rest of the day open. Always check the status reads N/A. This is covered in detail in the FAQ.
By default, Your Booking offers every optometrist who is active and set to appear in your Sunix appointment book. Optometrists who are inactive, or past their finish date, are not offered.
There's one thing to know here, because it catches practices out:
Choosing which optometrists are shown inside the Sunix appointment book does not, on its own, limit who patients can book online. Your Booking shows all active optometrists unless you tell it to do otherwise. If you've narrowed the optometrists shown in your Sunix appointment book and are seeing more of them online than you expected, this is why.
You have two ways to control it, both in Your Booking → Admin → Optometrists:
Option A — Follow the Sunix selection (Sunix only).
Turn on "Follow the Sunix appointment-book selection". Your Booking will then offer only the optometrists in the combination you currently have selected in Sunix — so the two always match, and you manage it in one place.
In Sunix, that selection is the Optometrist Display Combination. In the appointment book, click the Optom button (the one with the ◄ ► arrows, alongside the optometrist name buttons). Each row is a saved combination of up to five optometrists (Optom 1–5); highlight the one you want and click Select. Use New or Modify to change the combinations. Whichever combination is selected is the one Your Booking follows.
Option B — Turn optometrists on or off in Your Booking.
On the same Optometrists page, each optometrist has a Shown / Hidden from online booking switch. Hide anyone you don't want patients to book. This works independently of Sunix and has no five-optometrist limit.
Which should I use? If you already control who appears by managing your Sunix appointment book, Option A keeps everything in step with the least effort. If you'd rather control it directly in Your Booking, or you have more than five optometrists to show, use Option B. You can use both together — Your Booking will apply whichever restrictions you've set.
On Sunix, all of your appointment types come through to Your Booking automatically — there's no "online" flag to set in Sunix. You then choose which ones to offer patients, and write a short description for each, inside Your Booking. That's covered in the main Setup Guide.
| What you're seeing | Most likely cause | Where to fix it |
|---|---|---|
| A day is bookable online that should be closed | An all-day appointment left as Available instead of Not Available | Section 2 / FAQ |
| A closed weekday keeps reappearing | The weekday still has template slots | Section 1 |
| An optometrist appears online who shouldn't | Your Booking is showing all active optometrists | Section 3 |
| An optometrist is missing online | They're inactive/past their finish date in Sunix, or hidden in Your Booking | Section 3 |
If what you're seeing online doesn't match your Sunix setup, get in touch and include a screenshot of the day (or the optometrist list) in Sunix alongside what's showing online — seeing both together is usually all we need to spot the cause.