I use Calendly with my clients to allow them to schedule meetings with me at their convenience. I use iCal to display availabilities on Calendly. The problem is that my work email address is a Gmail account, so sometimes people will send me calendar invites via Gmail and these always just automatically go to my Google calendar. However, since Calendly is synching with iCal, that causes problems when I’ve accepted a Google Calendar invite and the time slot still shows as available in Calendly. Currently, I end up manually copying the Google invite to an iCal calendar, but I find this annoying and am wondering how I could avoid doing this or otherwise automate this.
Does anyone else have this problem (or have an idea of how to solve it)?
If I understand, seems like syncing calendly with your google calendar might solve the problem. The use Calendar to subscribe to the google calendar.
That’s how I do it, and it works for me. People don’t send me invites, but if they did and google calendar marked them as busy, it would reserve that time.
With people sending you invites, it negates some of the features of calendly, like have a time buffer before and/or after, having different appointment types and time lengths, etc.
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If only it were so easy. The problem is that I have multiple iCal calendars, which, in concert, inform the status of my availability on any given time/date. So, I have to have Calendly sync with iCal.
Totally agree with you on the preferability of receiving events via Calendly. Unfortunately, these are coming from clients and potential clients, who, though I have given them my calendly URL, still sometimes send me Google invites. It just doesn’t feel very friendly or service-oriented to tell them they’re doing it wrong. 
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I believe in Google Calendar’s settings you can disable the automatic acceptance of these invites, they should then come in as an email and be shown in Calendar as an invite.
Yes, this is true, and it’s how my calendar is currently configured. But I feel like it will be confusing to clients for me to decline their invitations and then tell them separately in another message that I’m actually accepting their invite. It’s really not viable for me to avoid accepting Google meeting invitations…unfortunately that route just creates other, social problems.
I think what I’m really trying to sort out is if there is some way to duplicate accepted Google meeting invites automatically on my iCal calendar.
Amazingly, Calendly’s solution involves creating new users for each mail account. And each of these new users would have an added cost:
Calendly can connect to one calendar platform per account . If you schedule with calendars across multiple platforms, you can use our team features to check them all.
- Create a separate Calendly account for each calendar platform you use
- Add the additional accounts as users under your original account
- Create a team page for all of your accounts
- Use collective scheduling to ensure Calendly only accepts new events when you’re available across all platforms
Clearly, this is not an ideal solution.
If I could figure a way to have all of the Exchange events in my Busycal calendar to be automatically duplicated and set to my work calendar – which is the one that syncs with Calendly – then it would have the expected effect of immediately blocking off that time in Calendly. It would also be an ugly hack, with two events displaying in Busycal for each of my Exchange appointments.
Bit of a mess trying to sync all of this…
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Here’s something I hadn’t seen previously: https://www.freebusy.io
Out of the box, it supports multiple calendars. I’m not in love with the interface vs. Calendly, but perhaps that is configurable.
Anyway, a very quick test shows it will integrate with multiple cals – in my case two Gmail and one Exchange.
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Ah ha! I thought I had searched their support forums for a solution, but somehow missed this. Thanks! I will definitely look into it.
Freebusy.io looks interesting as well…I’ll give it a look.
Just wanted to post an update, in case someone else comes across this thread and has the same problem.
I found this IFTTT, Copy of Google Calendar event to iOS calendar, which is working great so far!
No, now matter how someone sends me an appointment, it automatically ends up on the correct calendar.
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What about when they cancel/change an appointment?
Luckily, not much of an issue for me, as this is rare…so it’s easy enough to delete/update the duplicate appointment on that seldom occasion. Seems like someone could probably set up similar IFTTT’s using the same sort of trigger, though?
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Hillarious. The day after I mention this workaround, Calendly announces that they now allow you to connect up to six different calendars to check for availability. So, this workaround isn’t even needed anymore! 
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