A client looks at your booking page, sees a visibly empty hour, and the slot they want still doesn't show up as available. The usual reaction is to assume something's broken -- but more often than not, it's buffer time doing exactly what it's meant to do, quietly protecting time you'd otherwise lose.
What buffer time actually is
Buffer time is extra time added on top of a service's stated duration, reserved but not shown to the client as part of the appointment itself. A 60-minute haircut with 15 minutes of buffer doesn't show clients an hour-and-a-quarter booking -- it shows them a 60-minute slot, but the next booking can't start until 75 minutes after the first one began. The gap exists for you, not for them.
This matters because plenty of real work around an appointment isn't the appointment: cleaning a chair or treatment room between clients, sanitizing equipment, writing up notes, or simply the genuine reality that services rarely end at the exact minute they were scheduled to. Without buffer time, a calendar that looks perfectly booked is actually overbooked the moment anything runs even slightly long.
Why it's set per service, not per business
Different services need wildly different amounts of recovery time, which is exactly why this isn't a single business-wide number. A quick consultation might need none at all -- you can genuinely go straight from one to the next. A deep treatment or a service that leaves a mess to clean up might need 15-20 minutes before the room is ready again. Setting one blanket buffer for every service either wastes time on the services that don't need it, or doesn't protect the ones that do.
In ScheduloApp, buffer time lives on each individual service (Settings > Services) alongside its duration -- so a 90-minute colour service and a 15-minute patch test can each have their own correctly-sized gap, instead of sharing a compromise number that's wrong for both.
The direct effect on your calendar
Buffer time isn't cosmetic -- it's load-bearing in how available slots actually get generated. The available-times picker accounts for a service's duration plus its buffer before offering a slot, so a visibly free 45-minute gap on your calendar genuinely won't be offered for a 60-minute service with 15 minutes of buffer, because 45 minutes isn't actually enough room once the buffer is included. This is also exactly what stops back-to-back bookings from silently running your whole day late: the buffer is enforced at the moment a slot is generated, not left to chance.
Getting the number right
A buffer set too short defeats the purpose -- you're back to running late the moment one appointment overruns even slightly. A buffer set too long needlessly blocks bookable time that clients would have happily taken. The right number is usually just an honest estimate of the real overhead for that specific service: how long does cleanup, prep, or your own transition time actually take, on a normal day, not a perfect one?
If you've never set buffer time and have been noticing your days consistently run late despite a calendar that "looks" fully scheduled with no gaps, that mismatch between what looks available and what's actually survivable is usually the tell that your services need buffer time added, not that your calendar is wrong.