Running your day
Appointments
Appointments are visits with a time attached. The screen is a calendar of what is booked, and the actions on it move a booking through its day: confirmed, arrived, being served, done.
The calendar
Open a location and choose Appointments. You can view a day, a week or a month, and the view you pick is part of the web address, so a screen showing today can be left showing today.
Times are shown in the branch’s own time zone, whichever branch you are looking at and wherever you happen to be. The working day drawn on the grid comes from that location’s opening hours.
Creating a booking
Most bookings arrive through your public booking page. You create one here when somebody phones up, or is standing in front of you asking for next Tuesday.
Needs the permission visits.create (create visits). Owners and Admins have every permission by default.
The form asks for the customer, a service, a date and time, and — where you use them — a resource. Choosing the service is what sets the length, so the slot matches how long the work actually takes. The mobile number is optional, but without one the customer won’t get text or WhatsApp updates. You can also add a booking for today with the plus button on the Appointments column of the location overview.
Booking on somebody’s behalf still messages them
A booking you create sends the same confirmation as one the customer made themselves, provided you have a way to reach them. They get the details in writing rather than having to remember what was said on the phone.
Running the day
A booking starts as a held slot and moves through as much of the following as you find useful. None of it is compulsory — a shop that only wants to know who is coming can ignore the lot. The buttons appear when you click a booking on the calendar, and on the booking’s own page.
Confirm
Marks a booking as definitely going ahead. This is an approval step, so it only applies to a booking that is still just a request — confirming an already confirmed booking is refused rather than sending a second confirmation. Confirming needs visits.update (update visits).
Arrived
They are here. This does not end the booking; it records a fact about one that is still in play, so a booking can be arrived and still waiting to start. It sends the “Booking alerted” message, telling them you are ready for them. That is different from “Booking running late”, which an automation rule can send — and follow with a phone call — when somebody has not turned up by their time.
Serving
The appointment has started. Again, not an ending — it records when work began, which is what makes “how long did that actually take?” answerable.
Complete, no-show and cancel
The three endings. Complete means it happened; no-show means the time passed and nobody came; cancelling frees the slot and, if a resource was assigned, gives that resource its time back.
Needs the permission visits.serve (call and serve visits) and visits.cancel (cancel visits). Owners and Admins have every permission by default.
On the location overview, bookings being served sit in the Serving column alongside walk-ins. Dragging one to Completed completes it, with a few seconds to undo.
Only a completed booking can be reopened
A booking completed by mistake can be dragged from Completed back to Serving on the location overview. It goes back to being booked or confirmed, whichever it was, and nothing is sent to the customer. A cancelled or no-show booking is final — the actions are refused rather than rewriting a record your team has already closed. Create a new booking instead.
Opening a single booking
Every booking has a page of its own, reached from a name on the location overview. It shows the details — service and length, time, staff member, resource and the answers to your registration questions — with a history of what happened and when, and every message sent to the customer with whether it was delivered.
The same actions are there: Confirm, Arrived, Serving, Complete, No-show and Cancel, plus Mark as fake for a booking nobody real is behind. The page keeps itself up to date while it is open, and Show on the calendar takes you to that day.
Rescheduling
To move a booking, drag it to a new slot on the calendar. It is drawn in its new place straight away while the move is saved. In the day view, where each column is a member of staff, dropping it in somebody else’s column also hands it to them; in the week view it keeps whoever it was assigned to.
Needs the permission visits.move (move visits). Owners and Admins have every permission by default.
Every move re-checks availability, so you cannot accidentally move a booking on top of something else or outside the branch’s hours — a move that breaks a rule is refused with the reason, and the booking goes back where it was. The customer is told the booking changed, with the new time. The same happens when a customer moves their own booking from their confirmation page, where you allow it.
Assigning a resource
Where you have defined resources — a stylist, a room, a bay — a booking can be assigned to one. That is what prevents double-booking: an assigned resource is unavailable for the length of the appointment, so neither your booking page nor a member of staff can promise it to somebody else.
Without resources, nothing stops two bookings at the same time. For some businesses that is correct — three people can walk into a shop at ten o’clock. For a salon with two chairs, it is not.
Reminders and follow-ups
Bookings are the flow where the clock does most of the work. A reminder goes out ahead of the appointment and, if you have a survey on, a follow-up after it asking how it went, both sent by a scheduled job rather than by anybody pressing anything. Both are switched on per location, and their channels chosen, under customer messages.
You can also have unconfirmed and overdue bookings chased automatically — see automation rules.
Bookings and your figures
Bookings have their own section on analytics
Analytics has an appointments section of its own: how many bookings were made, completed, missed and cancelled, split by service, resource and team member, plus revenue. The waitlist figures above it (wait times, busiest hours, the daily chart) count waitlist visits only. For the bookings themselves, row by row, use reports.