Managing bookings
Appointments arrive in Bookings, as a list or a calendar.
The two views
- Bookings - a list you can search, filter and sort. Best for finding one booking.
- Bookings > Calendar - the same bookings laid out by day. Best for seeing your week.
Filter the list by staff member to see one person's workload.
The statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pending | Requested, waiting for you. Where bookings land when auto-confirm is off. |
| Confirmed | Agreed and going ahead. |
| Completed | It happened. |
| Cancelled | Called off, by either side. |
| No Show | They did not turn up. |
Marking No Show rather than Cancelled is worth the extra second: it is your record of who does this, which matters when someone asks for a fourth chance.
Booking on someone's behalf
New booking adds one yourself - for a phone or walk-in customer. It occupies the slot exactly like an online booking, so your calendar stays true.
Changes and cancellations
Change a booking's time or staff member from the booking itself. What the customer may do on their own depends on your cancellation window - see Availability & hours.
Reminders
Reminder emails are set in Settings > Bookings, as hours before the appointment. 24, 2 sends one
a day before and one two hours before. This is the cheapest thing you can do about no-shows.
Good to know
- A cancelled booking frees its slot for someone else to take.
- Do not delete bookings to tidy up. Cancel them - deleting loses the record of what happened.
- Bookings you take by phone belong here too. A calendar that only knows about online bookings will double-book you.
Money on a booking
Open a booking and the pane does more than change its status. Where money is involved it carries two more controls, and they are the ones people hunt for.
Mark paid settles a booking that was taken as pay-on-the-day, or one where the customer handed over cash or a transfer. It records the amount due as received, so your figures match reality without an invented order.
Refund returns money on a booking that was paid by card. You choose the amount, so a partial refund is a matter of typing a smaller figure than the total, and it is capped at what is actually left to refund on that booking. A reason is optional and worth filling in: it is what makes a refund from four months ago explicable.
Refunding is not the same as cancelling. Cancel the booking as well if the appointment is not going ahead, because the refund settles the money and the status frees the slot.
Next steps
Related reading
- How to reduce patient no-shows - the interventions in the order that costs you least.
- Cut no-shows with booking deposits - and the point at which a deposit costs more bookings than it saves.