Take and manage bookings

When a customer books a time, the platform finds their contact by email or creates one, checks that a staff member is free, and confirms the booking on the spot. Confirming creates an event on the staff member's Calendar, emails the customer a confirmation, and, on services set to do so, opens a CRM lead. You manage bookings under Appointments → Bookings, shown as a list, a form, or a calendar.

How a customer books

1. The customer opens your booking page at /appointment on your site. No login is needed.
2. They pick one of your published services.
3. They pick a day on a month grid, then a time. Days with no times are greyed out, and the times are shown in the visitor's own time zone.
4. They enter their name, email, phone, service address, and any notes.
5. They submit. The booking confirms and a confirmation page appears, with buttons to add it to their calendar (see Add it to a calendar) and a Manage this booking link to their own page for it (see below).

A booking made this way arrives already confirmed. There is no approval step.

The page protects itself from scripts. The form has a field people never see, and a form that fills it, or that comes back within 3 seconds of the page opening, is sent back with a request to reload the page. One connection can send 5 bookings in 10 minutes, one email address can book 3 times a day, and the list of times can be asked for 120 times a minute. Past a limit the visitor sees "Please wait a moment" and can try again a few minutes later.

Which times a customer sees

A time is offered only when all of these hold:

• It sits inside one of the service's weekly windows.
• It clears the service's minimum-advance lead time.
• It falls within the booking horizon.
• At least one eligible staff member has no conflicting event and no other booking at that time.

Calendar conflicts count even for events a staff member created by hand, so blocking personal time on Calendar also blocks public bookings.

Why are no times offered?

Work down this list when a day looks empty:

1. The service is not published.
2. No weekly window covers that weekday.
3. The time is inside the minimum-advance window (24 hours by default).
4. The date is past the booking horizon (30 days by default).
5. Every eligible staff member is busy then, counting events made outside Appointments.

Change any of these on the service. See Appointment types & availability.

How the booking page shows times

The standard booking page shows each visitor the times in their own time zone. It reads the zone from the visitor's browser, so for the same time a visitor in Karachi sees 7:00 PM where a visitor in Chicago sees 9:00 AM. The line next to the times names the zone they are in and, when it is not the zone of the service, the zone of the service too, for example "Host: Central Time (CDT)". A visitor can pick another zone from the list and switch between a 12 hour and a 24 hour clock. The page remembers the clock for the next visit.

On the month grid a day with no times is greyed out and cannot be pressed. "Next available" jumps to the first day that has a time. A visitor cannot go back before today or ahead of the service's booking horizon.

The page works with a keyboard and a screen reader. Arrow keys move between days that have times, Page Up and Page Down change the month, Home and End go to the start and the end of the week, and Enter picks the day. Each step moves focus to its heading, a day is named with its date and how many times it has, and a screen reader hears when times are loading, how many there are, and when something goes wrong. A form problem is written next to the field instead of in a pop-up.

If your website has its own design for the booking page, it keeps that design; this section describes the standard page and the page of a personal booking link.

What a confirmed booking does

• Creates a Calendar event. The customer and the assigned staff member are attendees; the notes carry over; the location is the service address the customer entered, or the type's location label. The event is titled with the name of the type and the two names, for example "Demo call between Jordan Lee and Priya Raman"; a type can word its own title (see Appointment types & availability). See Calendar.
• Matches or creates the contact. The platform finds the contact by email and creates one if there is no match, backfilling a missing phone number. See Contacts.
• Emails the customer a confirmation, sent when the contact has an email address on file.
• Opens a CRM lead when the service is set to create one, carrying the customer's details. See CRM.
• Adds the type's reminders to the Calendar event. See Reminders below.
• Tells the staff member with a bell item and, by default, an email and a phone or browser alert, unless an administrator has switched the notification center off. When nobody was available, it tells the staff of the appointment type, and then the administrators. A cancelled booking and a moved one tell them too. The message names the customer, their email and phone, the time (in the customer's time zone and in the type's) and where it is, and the email has an Open the booking button. If you try your own booking page while you are signed in, you are told about that booking too. People who manage Appointments can click Notifications on a booking to see who was told and why a way was skipped.

Manage bookings as staff

Open Appointments → Bookings for the full list. Each booking carries a status:

• Draft: created but not confirmed.
• Confirmed: the state a public booking arrives in.
• Done: completed.
• Cancelled: called off.

Cancelling a booking removes its linked Calendar event and frees the slot for someone else. A lead the booking created earlier stays; cancelling does not delete it. The customer gets one email saying the appointment is cancelled, with the time in their own time zone and a line that the host has been told. It goes only for a confirmed booking whose time is still ahead and that has an email address: a draft, a finished booking or a time that has passed sends the customer nothing. The staff are told as described above.

Customers see, cancel and move their own booking

Every booking has a private page. The customer opens it from the Manage this booking link on the confirmation page, or from the link in their confirmation email. The address holds a long secret, so only the person who booked, and anyone they send the link to, can open it. Browsers and search engines are told not to keep it, and a wrong address is a plain "page not found" that says nothing about whether the booking exists.

The page shows:

• the service and its status: Confirmed, Cancelled, Finished, Past, or Not confirmed yet;
• the time in the customer's own time zone, with your time zone beside it when the two differ;
• who the meeting is with, when the service names its staff;
• a Join the video call button while the meeting is still to come, or the address or the location note when there is no video call;
• a Reschedule button and a Cancel button, when you allow them.

When the customer cancels

The customer opens Cancel, may write a reason, and confirms. The booking is cancelled the same way as when you cancel it: the time is freed, the Calendar event goes, and the customer gets the one cancellation email. You are told through the notification center as for any cancelled booking, and the email to you carries the reason. The reason also shows on the booking under Reason the customer gave, and a line in the booking's chatter says it was cancelled by the customer. A second click on the button does nothing more.

When the customer moves it

The customer opens Reschedule and sees the same month grid your booking page has. Times are shown in their own time zone, they can pick another zone from the list, and they can switch between a 12 hour and a 24 hour clock. A day with no times is greyed out and cannot be pressed, Next available jumps to the first day that has a time, and the grid works with a keyboard and a screen reader, as it does on the booking page. They pick a day, then a time. A last step shows the new time and the time the booking has now, both in their zone, and one button, Move my booking, makes the change.

The times are the ones your booking page offers: your hours, the minimum notice, the gaps and limits of the service, your Calendar and your other bookings. The one difference is that the booking being moved never counts against itself, so a customer on a service that starts a meeting every 15 minutes can move from 9:00 to 9:15, and the time they have now stays on offer, marked "Your time now". A time the grid shows is a time the move accepts. The Calendar event moves, Calendar emails the customer its "Date updated" message with the new time, and you are told that the appointment moved. A line in the chatter says "Moved by the customer from ... to ...". If someone else takes the time a moment earlier, the customer sees a message and picks another one.

A browser that does not run scripts gets a plainer page that makes the same change: a day to choose, then the times of that day as a list. A workspace that switched the new booking page off gets that page too, and so does a customer whose browser cannot load the grid's script.

What you decide

Open an appointment type and go to its Customer changes tab.

• Customers can cancel: shows the Cancel button.
• Customers can move: shows the Reschedule button.
• Closes before the start (hours): the customer cannot cancel or move a booking inside this many hours before it starts. 0 means they can until it starts.

Types you made before this existed keep both switched on with no closing time.

A change is refused, and its button is not shown, when the booking is not confirmed, its start has passed, the switch for that change is off, or it is inside the closing hours. The page says why and tells the customer to reply to their confirmation email. The server checks the same rules when the customer presses a button, so a hidden button is never the only lock. One connection can cancel or move 6 times a minute; past that the customer sees "Please wait a moment" and can try again shortly. Looking at months on the grid has its own, roomier limit, the one the booking page uses (about 30 months a minute from one connection), so browsing never uses up the moves.

Choose how you are told

Each person decides how they hear about bookings, and a manager decides who else is told.

• Your own choices. Open Appointments → My notifications. It lists the appointment notifications (booked, moved and cancelled) with three switches each: In the app, Email and Phone and browser. Quiet hours and what a lock screen may show are on the same screen. The menu is there for everyone who uses Appointments, the same people who see Bookings. The bell's Notification settings opens the same switches together with every other kind of notification.
• From an appointment type. The My notification settings button at the top of an appointment type opens the same screen. The type's own Notifications tab is separate: it sets who else is told and which ways the type uses. Your own choices can turn a way off for you, never on.
• Alerts on this device. A phone or browser alert reaches you only after you allow it on that device. While you have no allowed device, a strip at the top of every Appointments screen says so and has one button, Allow alerts on this device. Click it and accept your browser's question. Not now hides the strip for a week in that browser. The bell's panel carries the same offer as a short line above Notification settings. Neither shows once your browser has been asked (allowed or blocked), while notifications are switched off for you or for the workspace, or when phone and browser alerts are not set up for the workspace yet. If your browser blocked them, allow them in the browser's site settings for this address and reload the page.

Reminders

A new appointment type puts four reminders on every booking:

The email goes to the customer and the host. A notification is a pop up in the app for the host, and an alert in the bell and on the host's phone when reminders as alerts are switched on. The invitation file the customer's calendar app reads lists all four as alerts, each titled with the meeting, so most calendar apps alert the customer too, before the meeting and when it starts.

A reminder that would already be too late when the booking is made is left out. A booking made 10 hours ahead gets the 1 hour, the 5 minute and the start time reminders but not the 1 day email. A booking made 30 minutes ahead gets the 5 minute and the start time reminders. When a booking is moved, the reminders follow the new time (see Reschedule a booking below).

The four are the starting point for a new type. A type you already have keeps the reminders it has. To change a type, open it, go to the Notifications tab and choose the reminders under Reminders to the customer and the host. Clear the list to send none. A calendar button that opens a web calendar (see Add it to a calendar) cannot carry reminders, because Google Calendar and Outlook do not accept them in a link: use the calendar file, or the emailed invitation, to get them. There is no SMS reminder.

Finished bookings

A confirmed booking is marked Done by itself an hour after its meeting ends, so the Confirmed list shows what is still to come. Draft and cancelled bookings stay as they are.

Video calls

For a type that is held by video, the confirmation and the invitation both lead with a Join video call button and show the link in plain text. The calendar event carries the same link, as its place and again in its notes, so it is there when the customer or the host opens the event in their own calendar, including an event added with the buttons below.

Add it to a calendar

The confirmation page, and the confirmation page of a personal booking link, show Add it to your calendar with four buttons: Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook and Microsoft 365, each with that calendar's mark.

• Google Calendar, Outlook and Microsoft 365 open that calendar in a new tab with a new event already filled in: the title, the time, the place, the customer's notes and, for a video call, the join link as the place and in the notes. The customer only has to save it. These web calendars take no reminders from a link, so the event has the reminders the customer's calendar uses by default.
• Apple Calendar gives the booking's own calendar file (.ics), which most calendar apps open, not only Apple's. It holds the same event with the video link and all the reminders (see Reminders above). The file carries the booking's own identifier, so adding it twice, or adding it after the emailed invitation, updates the event that is already there instead of making a second one.

The buttons and the file are for the person who has the booking's private link. They are given only to a request that carries the booking's secret, the same one as in the Manage this booking link, and a cancelled booking has none. A wrong or missing secret gets a plain "page not found". The marks are small pictures kept with the app, so the customer's browser does not ask another site for them.

Reschedule a booking

Customers can move their own booking too, see above. To move one yourself, open the booking, change Start and save. The Calendar event moves with it, Calendar emails the customer a "Date updated" message with the new time, and the staff are told as described above. The reminders follow the new time: one that is now too late is dropped and one that fits again comes back. A draft booking has no Calendar event yet, so changing its start only changes the booking.

Related

• Appointments: overview and turning the app on.
• Appointment types & availability: set open hours and lead times.
• Calendar: where confirmed bookings appear.
• Contacts: the customer record a booking matches or creates.
• CRM: the lead a booking can open.