Connect your calendar

Connecting your calendar is what turns your agent from a message-taker into a booker. Once it is linked, the agent can see when you are already busy, so it only offers a caller times you are genuinely free, and the job it agrees on lands in your calendar before the caller has hung up.

It takes about a minute, it happens entirely on screen, and you can undo it with one button.

What you need before you start

• A Google account with the calendar you actually work from. Google Calendar is the only calendar SwiftGuard connects to today. Microsoft Outlook and Apple Calendar appear on the screen with a Coming soon badge, so you can see they are on the way, but you cannot pick them yet.
• Owner or admin access to your SwiftGuard account. Team members can see the calendar screen but cannot connect or disconnect one, and the screen tells them so.
• A browser that will let SwiftGuard open a popup. Google's sign-in opens in a small window on top of the dashboard. If your browser blocks it, SwiftGuard falls back to sending you to Google in the same tab instead, so a blocked popup slows you down rather than stopping you.

One calendar at a time. Connecting a second Google account means disconnecting the first.

What SwiftGuard asks Google for

Google will show you a screen listing what SwiftGuard is allowed to do, with a tick box beside each one. There are three, and all of them have to be ticked:

What it's called	What it actually does for you
See your availability	Sees when you are busy, so the agent only offers times you are free
See calendar properties, including title and time zone	Reads which time zone your calendar keeps, so a job booked for 10am is 10am where you are
View and edit events on your calendars	Puts the appointments it books into your calendar

That is the whole list, and it is deliberately the narrowest set Google offers for the job. SwiftGuard sees your calendar as blocks of busy and free time, never the contents of your appointments: it does not know who you are meeting or what the job is, only that the hour is taken. It reads only the calendar you connect, not any other calendar someone has shared with you. It does not touch anything already in your diary, and it does not delete an event it did not create.

Untick any of them and the agent is crippled. Without See your availability it cannot tell a free morning from a full one; without the time zone it would offer times in the wrong hour; without View and edit events it can agree a time with a caller and then have nowhere to put it. Tick all three.

Connect it

Sign in and open the setup step named Connect your calendar. (If you have already finished setup, the same screen lives under Business, on the Calendar tab.)

1. Press Connect on the Google Calendar tile.
2. A small Google window opens on top of the dashboard. Sign in and pick the account whose calendar you work from.
3. On Google's permission screen, leave every box ticked and continue.
4. The window closes itself. You do not have to click anything to come back.

The tile turns green, reads Connected, and shows the account it is linked to, the date you linked it, and the time zone your calendar keeps - so you can see at a glance which clock your jobs are booked against. That is it - the agent can book from the next call onwards.

While Google's window is open the tile says Waiting for Google..., and two buttons sit under it. Resume in popup brings that window back to the front if it slipped behind the dashboard, or reopens it if you closed it by accident. Cancel abandons the attempt, and nothing is saved, so you can simply start again.

Which calendar does it book into?

The main calendar of the Google account you signed in with - the one your name is on. Not a shared team calendar, and not a second calendar you keep on the side.

Its time zone is the one the agent speaks in. If that account's calendar is set to Amsterdam, every time it offers a caller and every event it writes is Amsterdam time, whatever time zone the caller is ringing from.

A booked job appears in your calendar as a normal event: the work the caller asked for is the title, the address is the location, and anything the agent noted goes in the description. Cancel an appointment in SwiftGuard and the event normally comes straight back out of your calendar too. Once in a while it cannot: if we have lost access to your calendar, or the job was booked into a Google account you have since disconnected or swapped, the event stays put and that time goes on looking busy. Delete it yourself when that happens - and if you cancelled the job on the Appointments page, SwiftGuard tells you so on the spot and gives you a button straight to your calendar.

Your calendar is the boss, and it works both ways. Delete a booked job straight from Google Calendar and SwiftGuard marks it Cancelled for you, usually within a minute - you do not have to cancel it a second time in the dashboard. Drag it to a different time and SwiftGuard follows, so the Appointments page always shows the time that is really in your diary. What SwiftGuard will not do is change what the caller asked for: rename the event or edit its notes and the job, the address and the notes stay as the caller gave them.

One thing to know: if you turn a booked job into an all-day event, or make it repeat, SwiftGuard leaves the time it originally booked alone rather than guessing at a new one. If you want to move a job, drag it to the new time instead.

Which times will it offer?

Only times that pass all of these:

• Inside your business hours. New accounts start at Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 18:00, closed at the weekend. Change them on the Details tab under Business - including working weekends, and splitting a day around a lunch break.
• Not already busy. Anything blocked in your calendar is skipped, whoever put it there.
• Far enough ahead for you to get there. New accounts start at two hours, so nobody books you for the next ten minutes while you are still under a sink.

That last one is yours to set. On the Details tab under Business, Soonest a job can start decides how soon the agent may offer a caller a time. Two hours suits a business that plans a round; it is the wrong answer for emergency work, because a burst pipe at 9am is then offered half past eleven and rings somebody else. If you take call-outs, turn it down to fifteen minutes - or all the way to As soon as I'm free, which offers the caller the next half-hour slot you have open.

The agent offers a caller up to three times to choose from, every half hour, an hour long unless the job needs longer. It looks a fortnight ahead at a time - and if that fortnight is full, it keeps looking further out rather than telling the caller you have nothing. A diary booked solid until week five still gets the job booked in week five.

There is no limit on how far ahead a job can be booked. From your dashboard you can put one in the diary for next spring, or years out, by picking the time yourself.

Your business hours are the fence the agent draws inside, so keep them honest. A time you pick yourself in the dashboard is not bound by them.

If a box was left unticked

Google lets you complete its permission screen with a box unticked, so this is easy to do by accident and easy to fix.

The Google Calendar tile turns amber and says Action needed, then names in plain words what SwiftGuard still cannot do - "Put the appointments it books into your calendar", say. Press Reconnect, and this time allow everything Google asks for.

If enough was declined that SwiftGuard could not even read the calendar, nothing gets saved at all. The tile then says "A permission was left unticked on Google's screen, so your calendar wasn't connected" and the button reads Connect rather than Reconnect. Same fix: press it, tick everything.

Do not ignore an amber tile. A calendar that is connected but not fully allowed looks linked while quietly failing to book.

If it says "Reconnect required"

Occasionally the tile shows Action needed with "Reconnect required - your calendar link expired." The link between SwiftGuard and Google has stopped working - because the permission was withdrawn in your Google account, or because we rotated the keys that protect it.

Nothing is lost and nothing is wrong with your calendar. Press Reconnect, sign in again, and booking resumes. Until you do, the agent still answers your phone and still takes the caller's details - it just cannot put the job in your diary.

Disconnect your calendar

On the Calendar tab under Business, press Disconnect.

SwiftGuard withdraws its own access at Google and forgets the link. Everything Google holds stays exactly where it is: appointments the agent booked for you remain in your calendar, because they are yours. Your agent keeps answering calls; it just stops being able to book them.

Reconnecting later is the same three clicks as the first time.