Nothing on the booking widget knows you're closed for Thanksgiving unless you tell it. SalesThumb blocks bookings for a date/time window using Blackouts — a shop-wide closure list that blocks both the Flat Glass estimator scheduler and your main public booking page.
Where to find it
Settings → Sales Matrix, in the Estimate scheduler section near the bottom of the page. That's the same panel that sets your bookable hours, slot config, and available days — blackouts sit alongside them. (Don't confuse it with the Kiosk behaviour card higher up on the same page; that one controls kiosk display options, not scheduling.)
Adding a blackout
For each closure, fill in:
- Start and End — pick specific date/times, or check All day for a full-day closure
- Reason (optional) — a short internal label ("Thanksgiving," "Owner vacation," "Training day"). This is for your own team's reference in the list — customers never see it. They just see the slot missing from the calendar.
Click Add. There's no bulk "add federal holidays" option — if you want New Year's, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas blocked, add each one as its own row (or one multi-day row for a stretch like Thanksgiving through the following Monday).
Recurring closures
Sundays, half-day Saturdays, and your normal weekly rhythm aren't blackouts — they're the days-of-week and hours settings in the same Estimate scheduler section. Use blackouts only for one-off, dated closures.
What blocking actually does
Once a blackout is saved, both the public booking page and the Flat Glass estimator scheduler stop offering slots inside that window right away. It's one shop-wide closure calendar, not a per-bay setting — a blackout blocks the whole shop for that window, not just one bay.
Blackouts don't touch appointments that are already booked. If you're blocking a day that already has jobs on it, you'll need to reach out to those customers yourself to reschedule — SalesThumb doesn't currently flag or notify you about affected bookings when you add a blackout, so check your existing schedule before you block a day that's already partly full.
Tips
- Set your known closures for the year in January — New Year's, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas — plus anything shop-specific (training week, a planned vacation). Ten minutes now saves a scramble later.
- Check for existing bookings before you block a day. Since there's no automatic notification, you want to catch conflicts yourself, not find out from a customer who showed up.
- Think twice before blocking the day after a major holiday — those are often strong revenue days as customers bring cars in on their day off.