Overview

GSX appointments synchronization keeps your shop’s schedule and Apple’s booking system (GSX) in agreement – automatically and in both directions. You set your opening times and booking capacity in Fixably as usual, and Fixably does the rest:

• The availability you set in Fixably becomes the capacity Apple can offer customers.
• Every appointment booked in Fixably is reserved in Apple too — and a booking is only kept if Apple confirms it.
• Appointments customers make on Apple’s own scheduler flow into Fixably as real orders.
• Reschedules, cancellations, arrivals, and no-shows stay matched on both sides.

The whole feature follows one simple rule: never offer Apple more capacity than your shop can actually deliver. That is what protects you from overbooking — customers arriving for an appointment nobody can serve — and from lost bookings caused by under-reporting.

You never run the sync by hand. There is no “sync now” button and none is needed. It reacts to the things you already do in the normal screens, and background jobs keep everything tidy.

How it works

There are two directions, and they happen on their own:

An Apple appointment can start in three places, and all three become the same kind of Apple-backed appointment afterwards:

1. Appointment calendar – you book a visit on the in-house calendar.
2. Service Booking – the customer books themselves on your self-service site.
3. Apple’s own scheduler – the booking is made on Apple’s side and flows in.

Whenever a time slot is shown or confirmed for an Apple appointment, Fixably checks Apple’s real availability first. A slot Apple reports as full is never offered and never bookable. If Apple can’t be reached for that check, Fixably refuses the booking rather than risk overbooking.

Before you begin

Everything below must be in place before the sync does anything. If one piece is missing, the feature simply stays quiet for that location or service type — it never guesses.

Apple GSX connected. Your tenant needs a working Apple GSX integration — the same connection used for GSX repairs and parts. This is set up by Fixably or your integration owner; it is not self-serve.

Appointment Scheduler switched on. This subscription feature turns on the whole appointment-scheduling capability, including the Availability Manager where you set your availability. It’s enabled by your subscription / Fixably staff.

Your availability set up. The sync turns the availability zones you draw in the Availability Manager into the capacity Apple can offer, so there’s nothing to publish until you’ve set them up. See Setting your availability below.

Each location ready. Apple identifies a physical shop by its Ship-to code. For a location to take part, it must have appointment scheduling enabled and an Apple Ship-to code. A location missing either one is left out — it gets no Apple capacity and can’t host an Apple booking.

Set each location’s opening hours as well. An all-day availability zone is published to Apple using these hours, so they need to be correct.

Optional — the Service Booking app. If you want customers to book themselves, switch on the Service Booking app in System Settings → Booking App. You don’t need it for the sync to work: the operator calendar and Apple’s own scheduler still reserve and import appointments without it. It only adds the customer self-service route.

Setting up service types

A service type produces Apple capacity through the product codes it covers. Each Apple product code belongs to one Apple scheduling queue, and the queue sets the appointment length:

A few rules the form keeps for you:

• One Apple queue per service type. Once you pick a product code from one queue, the form disables the other queues’ codes. So a single service type can’t mix an iPhone (MOBILE) and a Mac (MAC). Several codes from the same queue — iPhone plus iPad — are fine.
• You can add non-Apple codes too. A service type can carry a non-Apple product code (for example a Samsung model) alongside its Apple ones. When someone books, the device decides the route: an Apple device is reserved in Apple, a non-Apple device goes through as a normal local appointment.
• The length is locked to the queue. MAC and MOBILE are 20 minutes, AUDIO is 10. The form fixes the duration field to match, so you don’t need to set it.
  
  

Setting your availability

You tell Apple when you’re open by drawing availability zones in the Availability Manager. A zone is a time range with a capacity and repeat logic, and it carries:

• one or more locations (or all of them),
• one or more service types,
• a capacity — how many appointments can run at once,
• recurrence — a one-off or a repeating pattern.

A zone doesn’t store fixed slots. Fixably works the slots out from the zone whenever it’s created, edited, or deleted, and again whenever someone is picking a time. Each slot is the length of its service type’s queue (20 minutes for MAC and MOBILE, 10 for AUDIO).

All-day zones follow your opening hours. A zone marked all day is published to Apple using each location’s opening hours for that weekday. Split hours — say 09:00–12:00 and 13:00–17:00 — produce slots in each shift and none in the gap, and a day the location is closed produces no slots. A zone with explicit start and end times uses those times exactly.

A few things naturally affect the capacity Apple sees:

• Overlapping zones add up. Apple recognises a slot only by Ship-to, queue, and start time. If two zones cover the same Ship-to, queue, and time, they make the same Apple slot, and the capacity reported is the sum. Delete one and the slot stays, now showing the remaining zone’s capacity.
• Non-Apple appointments share the capacity. A zone’s capacity is shared across all its service types. If a zone has capacity 3 and someone books a Samsung appointment in it at 10:00, the capacity Apple sees for 10:00 drops to 2.
• A slot that reaches zero disappears. When a slot has no places left, it is removed from Apple.

Closures

A closure blocks bookings for a time range — a whole day or part of one, such as a lunch break — either manually or from an imported holiday calendar. Any slots a closure overlaps are removed from Apple.

Booking on the calendar (Appointment calendar)

When you book an Apple appointment in the in-house calendar, Fixably reserves it in Apple as part of saving it.

The time picker offers only the slots Apple still has free for that service type, location, and date. Full slots are hidden, and so are closed and lead-time-blocked ones. The Suggest button finds the next free slot the same way.

The reservation is made before the local appointment is kept. Fixably reserves the slot in Apple first and saves the appointment only if Apple confirms; the order is then stamped with the reservation. If Apple says the slot has just gone, or can’t be reached, no local appointment is created — so you never end up with a Fixably appointment that Apple doesn’t actually hold.

Finding the product code is automatic. Fixably works out the Apple product code from the device — a stored code, a serial or IMEI lookup, or the device model — so most Apple bookings reach Apple even without a serial number. If no Apple product code can be found (for example, the device isn’t Apple), the booking simply goes through as a normal local appointment.

What you can expect when you save an Apple booking:

When the customer books themselves (Service Booking)

The Service Booking app is your customer-facing self-service site, switched on in System Settings → Booking App. Customers never see Fixably or Apple — they walk through a short wizard and get a confirmation email:

Brand → Device → Service → Location → Time → Device details → Contact details → Reserve.

On a tenant that uses the appointment calendar, the Time step reads its slots from the same availability and the same Apple check as your operator calendar, so only genuinely free Apple slots appear. The slot list is advisory — the server is the authority and re-checks at the moment of booking, so two customers can never both take the last seat in a slot.

Just like the operator flow, Fixably reserves the slot in Apple before creating anything locally when a customer confirms an Apple booking at a service location. The customer only ever sees friendly messages, never Apple’s technical error:

• Slot just taken — asked to pick another; nothing is booked.
• Apple unreachable — asked to try again shortly; nothing is booked.
• Apple rejects it — a generic “couldn’t create your appointment”; the technical error isn’t shown, but it’s recorded in Fixably’s logs so support can investigate.
• Apple confirms — the order is stamped, the booking is saved, and the confirmation email is sent.

Store and pickup bookings, and non-Apple bookings, don’t reserve in Apple — they go through as normal local bookings.

Self-service changes. From the link in their confirmation email, a customer can reschedule to another free slot or cancel, up to the appointment’s end time. Both sync to Apple — a reschedule moves the reservation, a cancel releases it.

When the booking comes from Apple

Customers can also book or change an appointment directly through Apple. Fixably pulls these in automatically — there’s nothing to re-key.

Fixably regularly fetches reservations from Apple. A genuinely new reservation creates an order, marked as coming from the Apple scheduler. On a location that uses the appointment calendar and whose product maps to a synced service type, it also creates a matching calendar appointment. Reservations are matched by their Apple reservation ID, so the same one is never imported twice — one visit never becomes two orders.

Status changes come in too. When Apple moves a reservation to arrived, cancelled, no-show, or a new time, the matching Fixably appointment is updated to follow.

Managing an Apple appointment

However it was created, an Apple-backed appointment is managed with the usual actions — cancel, reschedule, mark arrived, and mark no-show — and all four reach Apple. They split into two groups, and it’s worth knowing why they behave differently.

Cancel and reschedule change the slot itself, so they reach Apple straight away, while you wait, and the action only completes if Apple agrees. Mark arrived and mark no-show don’t change the slot — they only record what happened at the visit — so they’re sent to Apple quietly in the background and never hold you up.

Cancel

You cancel the appointment with a reason, the same as any other. The slot’s place is freed and returns to your available capacity, so someone else can book it.

Releasing the reservation in Apple happens as part of saving the cancel, and it has to succeed. If Apple can’t release it, the whole cancel is rolled back — the appointment stays as it was — so you’re never in the awkward spot of having cancelled it in Fixably while Apple still shows it booked. The cancellation reason is recorded on the order timeline.

Reschedule

You move the appointment to another free slot. The old slot frees up and the new one fills, and the reservation in Apple is moved to the new time at once — again, while you wait.

A reschedule keeps it as one visit and one order. Apple may hand back a new reservation ID for the moved appointment; Fixably stores it so that when it next pulls reservations from Apple, it recognises this as the same visit and doesn’t create a duplicate order.

Mark arrived

When the customer turns up, you mark the appointment arrived and its status moves from Reserved to Arrived. This is sent to Apple in the background, just after you save.

It’s best-effort by design: your local status sticks whether or not Apple is reachable at that moment, so a brief Apple hiccup never blocks you from checking a customer in. If the send doesn’t get through, it retries on its own, and it’s never sent twice.

Mark no-show

If the customer doesn’t turn up, you mark the appointment a no-show. Fixably also does this for you automatically overnight for any appointment still sitting at Reserved after its time has passed, so stale appointments don’t linger.

Like arrived, the no-show is sent to Apple in the background, best-effort, with the same automatic retry — it never blocks you and is never sent twice.

Either way, Apple’s own changes also flow back into Fixably (see When the booking comes from Apple above), so if a status changes on Apple’s side, the two systems still end up agreeing.

Only Apple appointments talk to Apple. Cancelling or rescheduling a normal local appointment makes no Apple call, and editing your availability over an existing reservation never cancels that reservation.

How far ahead bookings go

Apple uses two different ranges, and it helps to know they’re not the same:

• Capacity is published up to a set number of days ahead — currently 10 — rolled forward one day at a time by a daily job.
• Reservations can only be made within the slots Apple returns as bookable, which cover the next 7 days. So a slot can show capacity further out yet not become reservable until it falls inside that 7-day window.

When Apple is slow or unreachable

The sync is built to stay safe when Apple has a hiccup:

• A booking is refused rather than created locally, so you never overbook.
• Removing a slot keeps Fixably’s record rather than forgetting it, and retries.
• Arrived and no-show stay saved locally; the push just retries on its own.
• A booking that came from Apple is never sent back to Apple, and a booking already recorded is never created a second time.
• A background catch-up finishes anything a live update couldn’t complete, and a daily re-sync re-publishes the full range and corrects anything that was missed.

Troubleshooting

Most “it’s not working” reports come back to a setup step above. Work down this list before escalating.

Some problems aren’t “click again” issues — escalate these rather than retrying:

• Cancelled in Fixably but Apple still shows it booked.
• A duplicate order appeared after a reschedule.
• Apple offers a slot inside a closure.
• Arrived or no-show never reaches Apple after repeated tries.