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.
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.
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.
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.
Served
The appointment has started. Again, not an ending — it records when work began, which is what makes “how long did that actually take?” answerable.
Completed, no-show and cancel
The three endings. Completed 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.update (update visits). Owners and Admins have every permission by default.
A closed booking cannot be reopened
Once a booking is completed, cancelled or marked a no-show, none of these actions apply to it any more — the attempt is refused rather than rewriting a record your team has already closed. Create a new booking instead.
Rescheduling
Moving a booking to a different time re-checks availability, so you cannot accidentally move it on top of something else or outside the branch's hours. The customer is told the booking changed, with the new time.
Changing the service, the resource, the length or the party size counts as a change too, and sends the same message — the customer's copy of the details stays right.
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 a follow-up after it, both sent by a scheduled job rather than by anybody pressing anything. Both are switched on and worded per location under customer messages.
You can also have unconfirmed and overdue bookings chased automatically — see automation rules.