Why does my contractor scheduler keep double booking me?

Process: Double booking and capacity. Trade: General contractor. Reviewed 2026-10-07.

Short answerA contractor scheduler double books when subcontractors and crews are not separate resources. Give each trade or sub their own calendar, enter every site visit against them, and flag two visits that overlap before confirming either. Then one plumber is not promised to two houses.

The explanation

The project plan for each house is built in isolation. Two plans can both ask for the same electrician on the same Wednesday, and the conflict only appears when the electrician says he cannot be in two places.

Keep a shared calendar per trade, put every site visit on it and check it before confirming a date with any customer.

To test your own setup, make one booking by phone and one on the website for the same hour, in contractor terms the same crew and the same length, and see whether the second is refused. If it is not, the calendars are not sharing one source of truth. Repeat that test after any change to services or staff, since a new service with no length is a common source of overlap. Write down each result so the next change has a record to compare against.

Steps

List every place a contractor request can enter: website, phone, text and walk-in.
Move all of them into one calendar so no channel works from a private list.
Set a real duration on every service.
Set the number of crews, techs or tables as the true limit.
Test with two competing requests for the same hour before you trust it.

What to watch for

A second calendar that never syncs.
Manual overrides made without checking the board.

In general contractor

A general contractor depends on subs with limited time. A double booking of one specialist can idle a whole site until the next opening. All general contractor scheduling questions.

How Apex does it

In progress

Part of this is built. The rest is not. Status as of 2026-10-07; the badge shows the least-built feature involved.

Apex shows visitors real availability, holds an online request as pending until the owner confirms it, and can add buffer time between jobs. An overbooked warning on the schedule board is built as a demo screen and is not yet saving live data.

BK04Show real availability to visitors(Built, rolling out)
BK11Booking requires owner approval (request mode)(Built)
BK14Buffer time between jobs(In progress)
SC39Overtime / overbooked warning(Rolling out)

Apex Flow Scheduler is in early access. See how we label status.

Where this question comes from: we wrote it from research on common owner problems. It is not measured search demand.

Terms and comparisons on this page

Double booking