Set up online booking in 15 minutes

The most common reason a business abandons booking software is neither price nor a missing feature. It is an unfinished setup. A calendar with approximate services and the wrong working hours offers slots you cannot deliver, so the team stops trusting it.

This guide is written to be completed in one sitting. With three to five services and one employee, expect about 15 minutes. With ten services and four employees, allow 40.

Before you start, have three things ready: your service list with durations and prices, your working hours per day, and your logo.

1. Enter your business details

Enter your name, address, phone number and email exactly as you want a customer to see them. These appear in the confirmation message and on invoices, so avoid abbreviations. Add your logo; a public booking page without one reads as somebody else's site, and customers abandon the booking more often.

2. Set your real working hours

This is the step where most mistakes happen. Enter hours day by day rather than one pattern for the whole week. If Wednesday runs long and Saturday is short, enter that. If you take a lunch break, enter it as unavailable time rather than shortening the day.

Enter known absences ahead of time too: holidays, training, public holidays. An appointment you have to cancel later is a worse experience than one that was never offered.

3. Enter services with realistic durations

For each service, enter the name a customer would use, the duration and the price. Two rules matter more than the rest:

• Duration should include preparation and clean-up. If colouring is 90 minutes of work and 10 minutes of clearing up, enter 100 minutes or configure separate buffer time. Otherwise you run late all day.
• Use the customer's vocabulary. "Colour and blow-dry" is clear. "CB-2 combination" is not.

Leave out services you rarely perform or only do by arrangement. A shorter list means more completed bookings.

4. Add employees and their services

Give each employee their own working hours and only the services they actually perform. If you work alone, skip this step. If you have two employees performing different services, this is the single most important setting for correct availability.

5. Write down your cancellation policy

Set how long before an appointment a customer may still reschedule or cancel. The most common choice is 24 hours. State the policy in one sentence that appears in the confirmation message.

What matters is that the policy is definite rather than harsh. A stated policy with no penalty reduces no-shows more than an unstated policy with a threat, because the customer knows when cancelling is still acceptable.

6. Turn on the confirmation and the reminder

Configure two messages and no more: an email confirmation immediately after booking, and an SMS reminder 24 hours before. Both must contain a reschedule link.

Why that particular pairing, and when to add a third message, is covered in the article on choosing a reminder channel.

7. Book it yourself, then publish the link

The last step is the one you cannot skip. Open the public link in another browser and book an appointment exactly as a customer would. Check four things:

1. That the offered slots are ones you can genuinely deliver.
2. That the confirmation arrived and the details are correct.
3. That the reschedule link works.
4. That the appointment appears in your calendar.

Then delete the test appointment and publish the link in three places: your social profile bio, your email signature, and your own website as a button in the header.

What to configure later

The following are useful but not in the first 15 minutes, because they slow down getting started:

• deposits and online payments,
• visit packages and gift vouchers,
• Google Calendar and Zoom connections,
• custom message wording per service,
• invoicing from completed appointments.

Add each of these once your first week of bookings shows what you actually need.

If something goes wrong

The most common problem after setup is that the calendar offers a slot that should be occupied. Nine times out of ten the cause is an employee's working hours or a service duration that excludes preparation time.

If you would rather set it up together, book a 30-minute demo and we will do it against your real services. Prices and included volumes are on the pricing page.