Anyone running appointments, classes or site visits out of a Google Calendar who wants the rest of the operation — the customer, the job, the invoice — to live somewhere that can actually be queried.
Pull Google Calendar into RowFold tables you own — filter them, report on them, link them to everything else in the workspace.
And it stays current: importing again updates the same tables, adding new records and updating changed ones, so links from your other tables hold. Keep in sync does that for you hourly or daily.
Your team's busy time is read straight from Google Calendar, so a public booking page never offers an hour somebody is already committed to.
Matched per person by email address. If the calendar can't be reached the times stay on screen rather than the page emptying — it fails open, deliberately.
Automation steps that act on Google Calendar when something happens in RowFold:
What it doesn't do: An import only reads: nothing is written back to Google Calendar, a record deleted there stays here, and a sync runs hourly at most rather than the moment something changes. Anything else you have read about Google Calendar and RowFold, this page is the authority: it is generated from the connector's own code.
Three things have to meet: a connected Google account, a field on your staff table holding each person's calendar address, and a booking page told which field that is. Miss the last one and the connection sits there reading nothing, which is the commonest way this ends up half-built.
You'll know it worked: Block an hour in Google for one of your staff, wait two minutes, then reload the public booking page with that person selected. The hour should be gone. Two minutes is the cache: the slot list is redrawn on every page view and neither vendor would tolerate a live call each time.
The booking is the original and the calendar event is a copy of it, kept in step for as long as the booking exists. It builds on the walkthrough above, because the switch only appears once the booking page knows which field holds each person's calendar address.
You'll know it worked: The event appears on the connected account's calendar within a few seconds of the confirmation page, marked free rather than busy. If nothing appears, check the box is ticked on that page and that the connected account is a Google one: an Outlook calendar is read for busy times and cannot be written to yet.
A calendar draws time. It cannot tell you how many appointments were cancelled last month, or which service earns most per hour, because those are questions about a set of records and a calendar has none. Importing turns each event into an ordinary row.
You'll know it worked: The new table appears in the left rail with one row per event. Open it and check a date you remember. If every time looks an hour out, the calendar's timezone and the workspace's disagree.
Typing the same appointment into two systems leaves the calendar only as current as the last person who remembered. An automation writes the event as part of the thing that already happened, so the calendar becomes a copy rather than a second original.
You'll know it worked: Move one test record into the scheduled state and watch the automation's run log. A green run with no event in Google almost always means the calendar id was wrong, not that the step failed.
Your bookings live in a calendar, so they cannot be counted. Nobody can answer how many appointments were cancelled last month, which service earns most per hour, or which staff member is quietly overloaded, because a calendar is a drawing of time rather than a set of records.
Import the calendar and every event becomes a row in a table you own, with real fields. From there it is the same as any other data in RowFold — filter it, group it, total it, chart it, link each event to the customer it belongs to.
A booking page that does not know about the rest of your week will happily sell an hour you are already in a meeting. The usual workaround is blocking out personal time twice, once in the calendar and once in the booking tool, and the day somebody forgets is the day two people expect you at ten.
Connected calendars are consulted whenever a booking page works out what to offer. Busy is busy — a slot disappears from the public page because somebody accepted a meeting, with nobody maintaining a second copy of the week.
Work gets scheduled in one system and remembered in another. A job is approved in a tracker and then somebody retypes the date into a calendar so the engineer sees it, which means the calendar is only as current as the last person who remembered.
An automation creates the calendar event as part of the thing that already happened. When a record reaches the state that means scheduled, the event appears — on the right calendar, with the right title, without anybody typing it twice.
Calendar data is trapped in a shape that only a calendar can read. Exporting it gives you an .ics file, which is useful to exactly one kind of program, and that program is another calendar.
Once events are rows, they join everything else. Link an event to the client record, roll up hours per project, put a month of them on a report, or hand the table to the public API. None of that needs the calendar's permission.
No. This connector reads calendars, and what it brings across is events — one row per event. Contacts live in a different Google product with its own permissions, and RowFold does not currently connect to it. If you want a contacts table, import it from a spreadsheet or your CRM instead, then link your imported events to it, which is the more useful shape anyway.
It blocks the hours your team is actually busy, which is usually what people mean. An all-day event in the calendar removes that day; a two-hour meeting removes those two hours and leaves the rest of the day bookable. If you want a day closed for everyone regardless of anybody's calendar — a bank holiday, a refit — that belongs in the booking page's own availability, where one row closes the day for the whole business.
Each staff member's, matched by email address. The address on the person in RowFold is what ties them to the calendar that was connected, so one person's meetings never remove another person's slots. Somebody with no connected calendar simply has none consulted — they are not treated as busy.
Yes, once you switch it on. In the booking page's setup, the card that reports on staff calendars has a box, Put bookings on the connected calendar, and it is off until you tick it. From then on a booking taken through the page becomes an event on the connected account's calendar, with the person the booking is with invited as a guest. Moving the booking moves the event and cancelling it removes the event. The event is marked free rather than busy, because RowFold already holds that time and counting it twice would block the hour a moved booking had just left. A booking your team types into the scheduler is not put on the calendar, and the customer is not added to the event: they get a calendar file with their confirmation instead.
The page keeps working and keeps offering times. That is a deliberate choice: the alternative is a booking page that silently shows nothing because a third party had a bad minute, which costs far more than the rare double-booking it would prevent. The check is described as not having run rather than being quietly treated as a clear calendar.
It can. Importing the calendar again updates the same table, matched on Google's event IDs: a moved or renamed event is updated, a new one added, and Keep in sync does that hourly or daily. A cancelled event stays in the table, and each run looks back a year, so an event older than that stops updating. If you need the two to agree to the minute, create the events from RowFold rather than the other way round, so the record is the original and the calendar is the copy.
A calendar to put it on, a title, and a start and end that both carry a time as well as a date. A time with no timezone is read as UTC, so if your records hold local wall-clock times, be explicit about the zone — an event an hour out is harder to notice than one that failed.
There is no template to wait for. Type a sentence about what you run and RowFold assembles the tables, links, views and dashboard around it — then you change whatever does not fit.