If Beside isn't detecting your upcoming meetings, appointments aren't being scheduled correctly, or your calendar integration isn't working as expected, work through the steps below.

Meetings not being detected by Beside

Beside detects upcoming meetings from your connected calendar to prepare your Receptionist and generate pre-meeting briefs. If meetings aren't showing up:

Check your calendar is connected

Open the Beside mobile app
Go to Settings → Integrations
Check that your calendar (Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook) is connected and authorized
If it shows as disconnected, tap to reconnect and grant the required permissions

📌 Calendar permission: Beside needs calendar read access to detect upcoming meetings. If you denied permissions during setup, you'll need to re-grant them from your device settings: Settings → Apps → Beside → Permissions → Calendar.

Force a calendar sync

Disconnect and reconnect your calendar from Settings → Integrations
Force-close the Beside app and reopen it
Make sure your calendar events are on the connected account, not a different calendar or shared calendar that Beside can't access

Receptionist scheduling issues

If your Receptionist is supposed to schedule appointments but isn't doing so correctly, work through these checks.

The Receptionist isn't offering time slots to callers

Check your availability settings - make sure you've defined your available hours in the Receptionist scheduling settings. If no availability is set, the Receptionist can't offer time slots to callers
Check calendar write access - scheduling requires both read and write access to your calendar. Verify that Beside has both permissions granted
Check for calendar conflicts - if your calendar is showing as full, the Receptionist won't offer those times. Review your calendar for events that may be blocking slots unexpectedly
Only :00 and :30 start times are offered - the Receptionist currently offers appointment start times on the hour and half-hour only, not :15 or :45, even with a 15-minute duration set. This is a known limitation, not a misconfiguration. 📖 Schedule appointments with your Receptionist

The Receptionist confirmed a booking but the event isn't in my calendar

If your Receptionist told a caller a meeting was booked but you can't find the event in your calendar, the most likely causes are:

Calendar write access is missing - the Receptionist can tell the caller "your meeting is booked" based on its scheduling logic, but if Beside doesn't have write permission to your calendar, the event is never actually created. Go to Settings → Integrations and reconnect your calendar, granting both read and write permissions when prompted.
Event written to a different calendar than you expect - Beside writes events to the primary calendar on the account you connected. If you're checking a secondary calendar, a shared calendar, or a different account, the event won't appear there. Confirm which calendar account is connected under Settings → Integrations.
Calendar sync delay - in rare cases, the event can take a few minutes to propagate. Force-close and reopen your calendar app, or refresh the web view, to pick up the new event.

If you've checked all of the above and the event still isn't there, contact our support team with the approximate call time and the caller's number so we can investigate.

💡 Tip: After reconnecting, make a test call to your Beside line and ask the Receptionist to book a time. Then check your calendar within a minute or two to confirm the write flow is working end-to-end.

FAQ

Beside detects some meetings but not others. Why?

Beside only detects meetings on the primary connected calendar account. Events on secondary calendars, shared team calendars, or calendars from a different account won't appear unless that account is also connected. Check which calendar is connected under Settings → Integrations.

My calendar is connected but Beside isn't showing upcoming meetings. What should I check?

First, make sure the events are on the calendar account that's connected to Beside (not a secondary or shared calendar). Then try disconnecting and reconnecting the calendar, and force-closing the app.

The Receptionist offered a time slot that I'm already busy for. How do I fix this?

The Receptionist reads your calendar to avoid conflicts, but only for events on your connected calendar account. If the conflicting event is on a different calendar or account, it won't be visible to Beside. Make sure all your availability-affecting events are on the connected calendar.

Can the Receptionist book multiple appointments in the same time slot?

Not by default. The Receptionist treats each booking as an exclusive slot and won't offer a time that already has an event on your connected calendar. This is the right behavior for one-on-one appointments, but it doesn't fit use cases like group sessions, classes, or overlapping consultations where you want several callers to book the same slot. Support for group or multi-booking slots isn't available today. If this is important for your business, let our team know through the in-app chat so we can factor it into future scheduling improvements.

The Receptionist told my caller the meeting was booked, but there's no event in my calendar. What happened?

The most common cause is missing calendar write permission - the Receptionist confirmed the booking based on availability, but couldn't actually create the event. Reconnect your calendar from Settings → Integrations and grant both read and write access. Also confirm you're looking at the same calendar account that's connected to Beside. If everything looks right but the event is still missing, contact our team with the approximate call time so we can investigate.

Fix calendar and scheduling issues