Bookings, staff and hours

Service kinds

Every service is one of four kinds. The kind decides how it's booked.

Visits: travel time and service area

• Travel buffer. Set how many minutes to keep free before and after each visit for driving. Those minutes block your calendar too, so visits are never booked back to back across town.
• Service area. List the ZIP or postal codes you cover. Each entry matches the start of a code, so 941 covers 94110 and 94117. If someone's address is outside your area, they're told so and offered a call-back instead. Leave the list empty to accept any address.

Classes: sessions and capacity

Schedule class sessions in the dashboard. A session can repeat weekly for up to 52 weeks. Each session has a number of spots (it uses the service's capacity unless you set one for that session), and the booking flow shows how many are left. When a session is full, it stops showing.

Other service settings

• Length, plus optional buffer time before and after (for setting up or cleaning down)
• Price, or "price varies", which shows "From $X" or "Price varies"
• Confirmation: instant, or approve each booking

Your team

Add each person who takes bookings. For each person you can set:

• Which services they do. If you don't assign anyone to a service, everyone who takes bookings can do it.
• Their own hours. People without their own hours follow the business hours.
• Time off (see below).
• A login, so they can see their own schedule. Invite them by email; the invite link works for 7 days. Staff see and hear about their own bookings only. Managers can change settings; only the owner can manage billing, the phone number and developer keys.

"Anyone available"

Customers can pick a person, or take whoever's free. You can also turn off picking altogether in your booking rules, so every booking goes to whoever's free.

When nobody is picked, a time shows as open if anyone who does that service is free then. The booking goes to whoever has the fewest bookings that day, so work is spread out. If a customer moves their booking and their person is busy at the new time, it can move to someone else who's free.

Booking rules

Time off and holidays

Add time off for one person, or for the whole business (a holiday or a closure). Each block of time off can stop:

• bookings only
• calls only (no live transfers or call-backs, see call hours)
• both

Times are in your business's timezone. When you add time off, the dashboard lists any bookings that now clash with it. Those bookings aren't moved or cancelled automatically, so you can decide what to do with each one.

Approve each booking

Turn this on for one service, or for all bookings. Then:

1. The customer gets a "Request received" message instead of a confirmation.
2. The time is held for them, so nobody else can take it.
3. You get a "New booking request" alert and approve or decline it in the dashboard.
4. When you approve it, the customer gets the confirmation and reminders. When you decline it, they're told it's cancelled.

Bookings you make yourself, in the dashboard or with your assistant, skip approval.

Reminders

Customers get these automatically, each with a link to change or cancel:

• a text 24 hours before
• an email 24 hours before
• a text 2 hours before

You can turn each one off. Moving a booking resets its reminders, and cancelling it stops them. Customers who texted STOP don't get texts.

Review requests. If you turn this on and add your review link, then when you mark a booking completed the customer gets a short "thanks, a review helps a lot" message two hours later, by text or email. It's off by default.

Waitlist

When nothing suitable is open, the receptionist can add the customer to the waitlist for a service, for the dates they want (two weeks if they don't say).

When a time frees up, you can offer it to the people waiting for it, from the dashboard or by telling your assistant. If you tell your assistant someone isn't coming ("Carrie can't make it today"), it gives you options. When people are waiting for that time, one of them is to cancel, text the customer a link to rebook, and offer the slot to the waitlist in one tap.

• Everyone offered the time gets a link by text (unless they've opted out of texts) and by email, if we have their address.
• The first person to tap Claim this spot gets it, and everyone else goes back to waiting.
• An offer nobody claims within 2 hours goes back to waiting too.
• Waitlist entries end when their last date has passed.

Calendars

Your bookings in your calendar app

Each person has a private calendar link (it ends in .ics). Add it to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook as a subscribed calendar ("From URL" or "Subscribe to calendar"), and their bookings appear there.

• It shows confirmed and completed bookings, and requests waiting for approval (marked as tentative), from 30 days ago onwards.
• Each event has the customer's name, the service, their phone number and any booking notes. Keep the link private.
• Calendar apps refresh subscribed calendars on their own schedule. Google can take several hours.

Your personal calendar blocks time

Paste a private calendar link into a person's profile and their personal events block booking time, so nobody books them during the dentist or the school run.

Where to find the link:

• Google Calendar: Settings → your calendar → Integrate calendar → "Secret address in iCal format"
• Apple iCloud: share the calendar as a Public Calendar and copy the link (webcal:// links are fine)
• Outlook: Settings → Calendar → Shared calendars → publish a calendar and copy the ICS link

How it works:

• We check the link every 10 minutes and look 120 days ahead.
• Events marked "free" and cancelled events don't block anything.
• Events that repeat daily or weekly are understood. Other repeat patterns (monthly, yearly) only block their first date, so add those as time off.
• We keep each event's time and a short version of its title, so you can see why a time is blocked.
• If the link stops working, the person's profile shows the error.