What Tokiawase does
Tokiawase is a scheduling service. Here is what works without an account, and what signing up adds.
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- Getting started
Tokiawase is a scheduling service
Proposing candidate times, collecting what the other people can manage, and settling on one of them all happen on screen. There are two ways to use it. Quick schedule works without an account. The four scheduling methods work once you have signed up. Which of the two you use decides whether notification emails and calendar entries are available at all.
You can try it now without signing up
The way in is the "Quick schedule without signing up" button on the home page. It appears in two places, once near the top of the page and once in the band at the bottom, and both lead to the creation page at /en/quick/new. The person creating the schedule does not need an account either.
Creating one issues two URLs on the spot, one for the participants and one for the organiser. Participants open the URL they were sent, give a name, which is required, and a comment, which is not, and answer the proposed times. They need no account, and there is no field asking them for an email address. How to create a page, and the two modes it can be created in, are covered in Using Quick schedule without an account.
A Quick schedule page stops being available 90 days after the last activity on it. Opening the page to look at it does not push that date back. Creating, editing, answering, and confirming do. Handing the page over to an account removes the limit altogether.
An account gives you four scheduling methods
Once you are signed in, the four below are under "Scheduling methods" in the sidebar.
- Poll — the host lists the candidate times and participants answer the candidates with ○, △, or ×.
- Team availability — candidate times that everybody is free for are worked out from the availability of the members of your organisation.
- Booking link — open slots are built out of the hours you accept bookings in, and whoever receives the URL picks one of them.
- Group booking link — the same mechanism, shared between several hosts.
With the two booking links, the time is confirmed at the moment the other person picks a slot. There is no stage at which the host approves the booking first.
Team availability needs the host to have Zoom connected before the session can be created at all. Its conference method is fixed to Zoom, and the automatic meeting URL cannot be switched off. If the connection lapses afterwards, confirming sends no confirmation email. How the connections are meant to work is in Connecting your calendar and meeting tool.
What runs after a time is confirmed is the same for all four methods: the meeting URL is issued, the calendar entry is written, the confirmation email goes out, and the reminders are scheduled. The order they run in and the conditions each one has are in What happens automatically once a time is confirmed. What each method needs you to have in place beforehand is in What each scheduling method needs before you start.
What is available differs between the two
| Item | Quick schedule (no account) | The four methods, with an account |
|---|---|---|
| Confirmation and reminder emails | Not sent | Can be sent. A response reminder to those who have not answered exists for Poll only, and is off by default |
| Calendar entry | None | Can be written once the time is confirmed |
| Automatic meeting URL | None | Can be issued |
| How long it is kept | 90 days from the last activity | A Quick schedule that has been handed over loses the 90-day limit |
| Cost | Free, and never counted towards the number of schedules created in a month | Nothing on the Free plan. The conditions on Pro and Business are set out in How pricing works |
If you were only sent a link, there is nothing to set up
If a Tokiawase URL has arrived and all you are doing is answering it or booking a slot through it, none of the steps above apply to you. No link asks you to register or to sign in. You give a name and whatever else the page asks for, and answer or book from there. Telling the links apart, and what each of them asks you to fill in, is covered in When a Tokiawase link arrives.
Pricing is per person, and there are three plans
The plans are Free, Pro, and Business. The price is worked out per person, and the people it applies to are the members of your organisation. Participants who only answered a poll, and the people who booked a slot through a booking link, make no difference to the price, however many of them there are.
Free carries conditions on the number of members and on the number of schedules you host in a month. Who is counted, and which methods count towards the monthly number, are in How pricing works. The figures themselves are on the pricing page.
Start by creating one Quick schedule
- Create one schedule from "Quick schedule without signing up" on the home page, and share the participant URL with the people who are answering.
- Save the organiser URL you are given to a bookmark or a note. It is the URL you use to look at the responses and to confirm the time.
- If you expect to keep using it, register by following Creating an account and hand that Quick schedule over from the organiser URL.