📝 If you've used this report before: This is a significantly updated version with a clean, responsive interface, allowing for sorting at the practice and provider level, searching and dynamic insights.
A new Diary Insights panel sits above the grid and surfaces the most significant whitespace issues automatically, with an observation and a recommended action for each.
Summary tiles now show totals across the full period at a glance.
Generating the report
Set your Date Range using a preset or custom dates. The Diary supports future dates, so you can look ahead and spot whitespace before it becomes a problem.
Select the Practices and Providers you want to include.
Click Create Report.
No data loads until you click Create Report.
Summary tiles
The four tiles at the top give you a period total across all selected practices.
Tile | What it shows |
Hours Available | Total unblocked clinical hours across your selected practices and date range |
Hours Booked | Hours filled with patient appointments |
Hours Whitespace | Unbooked hours — available time minus booked time |
Utilised | Hours booked as a percentage of hours available, with a Low, Fair, or Good badge |
Diary Insights
Below the summary tiles, the Diary Insights panel automatically analyses your diary data and surfaces the issues that need attention most. Each insight has a headline observation and a sub-line action recommendation.
Examples of what Diary Insights surfaces:
Which practice has the highest whitespace percentage, and how many hours are unfilled
Which providers have the most unbooked time, and which days are worst
Which day of the week has the most whitespace across all practices
Which practices are furthest above the group average for whitespace
Where an insight relates to a specific practice or provider, it is clickable — click it to jump directly to that location in the grid below.
💡 Tip: Read Diary Insights before scrolling the grid. It does the analysis for you and tells you exactly where to focus your rebooking effort.
Use the collapse arrow in the top right of the panel to hide Diary Insights if you want to focus on the grid.
The diary grid
The grid is the main working view. It shows every day in your selected date range as a column, with practices listed as rows
Summary rows
At the top of the grid, three summary rows show totals across all practices for each day:
Available Time (Hours) — total unblocked clinical hours for that day
Appointments (Hours / Count) — total hours booked and number of appointments
Whitespace (Hours / Percent) — total unbooked hours and whitespace as a percentage of available time
These give you an instant read on which days have the most capacity and which are most under-utilised.
Practice rows
Below the summary rows, each practice appears as a row with a green and red progress bar for each day. The green portion represents booked time, the red portion represents whitespace.
The Total column on the right shows each practice's overall utilisation percentage for the period, colour-coded as Low, Fair, or Good.
Click any practice row to expand it and see individual provider rows within that practice.
Provider level
Each provider row shows the same green and red utilisation bars per day, with their total utilisation percentage on the right. The provider's role (e.g. Dentist) is shown alongside their name.
Click any provider row to expand it into a visual diary view — a calendar grid showing their working hours on the Y axis and each day as a column.
Booked appointment blocks appear in green, whitespace gaps appear as empty space, and any red slots indicate available time. This gives you an immediate picture of where gaps are sitting in the day.
Daily diary drill-down
Click any day column within a provider's visual diary to open the Daily Diary panel for that provider on that date. This shows:
A summary bar showing total booked hours, total gap hours, percentage booked, and slots filled
A full slot-by-slot list of the day's appointments, each with the appointment time, patient name, contact number, treatment description, and duration
Any blocked or available slots clearly marked
Use this to see exactly what is in a provider's diary for a given day — and where the gaps are that could be filled.
You can also export and print the daily appointment list if required from this window.
💡Top tip: Dentally users can now click on the patient name or code to access their file directly
Sorting and searching
Use the Sort dropdown to reorder practices alphabetically or by utilisation. Use the Search box to find a specific practice or provider quickly — useful when working across a large group.
Use Expand All to open every practice at once, or Collapse All to return to the summary view.
Utilisation thresholds
The Utilised tile and practice-level badges use the following colour coding:
Good (green) — 95% or above
Fair (amber) — 80% to 94%
Low (red) — below 80%
Exporting
Click Export to download the diary data as a CSV, Excel workbook, or PDF.
💡 Coming soon: Scheduled report delivery will be available in a future update.
Resetting the report
Click Reset Configuration to clear all filters and return the date range and selections to their defaults.
Commonly asked questions
Can I look at future dates? Yes. The Appointment Diary fully supports future date ranges. Set your date range to a future period to see where whitespace is currently forming — while there is still time to fill it.
What counts as whitespace? Whitespace is any unblocked clinical time that does not have a patient appointment scheduled. Cancelled, failed, and audit-status appointments are excluded from booked time, so they count as whitespace.
What happens when I expand a practice row? You see a row for each provider within that practice, with their own daily utilisation bars and a total utilisation percentage for the period. Click a provider row to expand it into a visual diary showing their booked and available time by hour for each day. Click any day within the visual diary to open the full slot-by-slot appointment list for that provider on that date.
Why does a practice show no data on some days? This typically means the practice had no unblocked diary time on that day — for example, if it was closed or no providers were scheduled.