Importing your Lantum or LocumDeck calendar — stop double-entering shifts
How to pull booked shifts from Lantum, LocumDeck, or other booking platforms straight into your session tracker, so you're not typing the same details out twice.
- calendar
- lantum
- locumdeck
- getting-started
If you book shifts through Lantum, LocumDeck, or a similar platform, you’ve probably noticed the annoying bit: the booking lives in one app, and then you type it all out again into whatever you use to track sessions and invoices. Here’s the fix.
The idea in one sentence
Most booking platforms can give you a calendar feed (an “iCal” link) — a live, always-up-to-date list of your booked shifts that another app can read. Instead of retyping session details, you import that feed and let it fill in the groundwork for you.
Where to find your feed link
- Lantum: look in your account or calendar settings for a calendar sync or export option — it’ll give you a URL rather than a downloadable file.
- LocumDeck: similarly, check calendar or integration settings for a shareable calendar link.
- Other platforms (Patchwork, general iCal-compatible tools): the same idea applies — you’re looking for a link, not a file you manually re-download each time.
The exact wording varies by platform and changes occasionally as they update their own interfaces, so if you can’t find it immediately, their help centre or support chat is the fastest route — quicker than hunting through every settings menu yourself.
What importing actually saves you
Once connected, new booked shifts show up as draft sessions ready for review — date, time, and site pre-filled from the booking. You’re not starting from a blank form for every shift; you’re checking a handful of pre-filled fields and confirming.
Worth knowing: fee details often don’t come through cleanly from every platform (some booking systems don’t expose the fee amount in their calendar feed at all), so you’ll usually still fill that part in yourself. It’s not fully automatic end-to-end — but going from “type everything” to “confirm and add the fee” is still a real time save, especially across a busy month.
A word on duplicates
If you’ve already manually logged a shift and then import a feed that includes it too, you don’t want it appearing twice. Good import tools will flag likely duplicates (matching date and site) so you can skip re-adding something you’ve already got — worth checking this happens before you confirm a big batch import, especially the first time you connect a new feed.
Tip: Do your first import in a quiet moment, not five minutes before a shift. The first sync often pulls in weeks or months of history, which is a good chance to review your data — after that, new shifts trickle in a few at a time and take seconds to check.
Setting it up in LocumBook
LocumBook supports iCal feed import from Lantum, LocumDeck, and other calendar sources — you paste in the feed link once, review the draft sessions it finds, and confirm the ones you want to add. It’ll flag likely duplicates against sessions you’ve already logged, so you’re not cleaning up a mess afterward.
See Calendar and import in the user manual for the step-by-step.
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