Integrations · Your calendar
Google Calendar
Connect a Google Calendar and the agent stops offering hours you are already busy in — including the ones Harkbell knows nothing about.
Reads busy, writes bookings
What it does
It closes the walk-in gap
Your diary knows every appointment Harkbell made and nothing else. Take a walk-in at the counter, block out a school run in your phone, or accept a job over text, and without this the agent will confidently sell that hour to somebody on the phone. This is the single most common way an otherwise good agent embarrasses its owner.
Connect the account once, point each column at a calendar
A three-chair salon signs in to Google once and picks three calendars — or the same one three times, if that is genuinely how they work. The consent screen happens once, not once per chair, and columns that share a calendar cost one lookup rather than one each.
Confirmed bookings appear on your calendar too
Bookings Harkbell confirms are mirrored onto the calendar you choose, so the thing you glance at over breakfast is the complete picture rather than half of one.
It half-solves every diary we do not integrate with
Fresha, Booksy, GlossGenius and Mindbody all sync out to Google. We don't integrate with those booking systems directly, but reading the calendar they sync to is enough to stop the double-booking — pair it with one-tap requests and a studio on any of them is properly served from day one. Be clear about what the one tap does, because it is the work that remains: confirming creates the appointment in Harkbell and on the Google calendar you connected, and those four take nothing back from a calendar, so you add that one entry in Fresha or GlossGenius yourself. It is a minute at the desk instead of a voicemail to return, and it is a minute worth pricing before you commit. Square, Calendly, Acuity and Vagaro are a different case: those we book into directly.
A silent calendar closes the diary, not opens it
If Google cannot be reached, that column's times stop being offered and the agent takes a message. An unreachable calendar is not an empty calendar, and treating it as one is how you sell the same hour twice. Writing the booking works the other way round: a calendar that has just gone quiet, having answered a minute earlier, does not stop the appointment being taken. Losing a caller who was ready to book is worse than an appointment you can see and move.
Turning it on
- Open Integrations and connect your Google account. You can grant read-only access if you never want us writing to your calendar.
- Choose which calendar each column of your diary should read.
- Publish. The next availability check consults it.
What this actually takes
- A Google account and one consent screen.
- The built-in Harkbell diary. A business whose diary is Square, Calendly, Acuity or Vagaro already has that provider's own availability consulted, so the overlay is not read on top of it.
the part nobody else prints
What it will never do
- Read what your appointments are. We ask free/busy and are told that you are busy from two until four. We never learn who with, we never list your events, and there is no code path that could.
- Treat a calendar that will not answer as an empty calendar.
- Reach anything else in your Google account.
Questions people ask about this one
Can you see what my meetings are?
No. The connection uses Google's free/busy endpoint, which returns blocks of time and nothing else — no titles, no attendees, no descriptions. We learn that you are busy from two until four and that is the whole of it.
Can I connect it read-only?
Yes, and some people should. If your appointments live somewhere else and you only want the double-booking stopped, grant read access and we will never write an event.
My diary is Fresha. Does this help?
Very much. Fresha syncs out to Google, so reading that calendar stops the agent offering hours Fresha has already sold. Combine it with one-tap booking requests and you have a working setup without us integrating with Fresha at all — with one job left yours: the request you confirm becomes an appointment in Harkbell and on your Google calendar, and you add it in Fresha, because Fresha publishes its diary outwards and accepts nothing back.
Your calendar
Hear it before you connect anything.
The free plan has real answered minutes. Put it on your own website, ask it the questions your callers ask, and connect Google Calendar when you are convinced.