Online booking and availability

A customer who wants work done wants to know one thing before anything else: when can you come. Availability is your published answer to that, and online booking is that answer opened to the people asking — on your public page, on a client’s own link, and on the phone.

Every door gives the same answer, because they all read the same calendar and the same crew.

Say what you can be booked for

Under Settings → Bookable Services, list the things a customer may book. Each one carries:

• How long it takes — the duration, which is what makes a real slot possible at all.
• A published price, in your own words, if you want one shown.
• The kind of work it should be filed under, so the job lands in the right place.
• Whether the diagnostic fee applies.
• Who performs it — which of your people can do this work.

You can archive a service, restore it, and drag them into the order a customer sees. Archiving a worker takes them off every service that named them, so you cannot end up offering a slot nobody can attend.

Say when you can be booked

Settings → Online Booking holds the rest of the answer:

• Customers can book a visit online — the master switch.
• How you promise a time — arrival windows (Morning) or exact times. Pick the one you can actually keep.
• Booking hours, per day, started off from your Hours of Operation.
• Minimum notice (hours) — how much warning you need.
• Booking horizon (days) — how far ahead you will commit.
• Capacity — a number of visits per window, or one per bookable person.
• Travel buffer (minutes) — the gap between jobs so the slot is honest.
• Slot interval — how finely the day is cut.
• Blackout dates, each with a private reason so you remember why.
• Confirmation — Instant, or Hold for my confirmation if you would rather approve first.

A seven-day preview on that page shows exactly what a customer would be offered, so you can see the effect of a change before a stranger does.

How a free slot is worked out

Availability is arithmetic over things you already keep: your booking hours, your blackout dates, your capacity, your travel buffer, the service’s duration, and the appointments already on the calendar.

There is one computation and every door reads it. The office’s Find a time in the appointment form, the intake screen, your public page and the phone all reach the same answer — so you never give a customer one answer and your own screen another.

Two things make a booking here worth more than a booking on a generic scheduler:

• It knows your territory. The service zones you drew decide whether a stranger can book at all. Somebody outside your area is captured as a request instead, because a booking you would not actually drive to is worse than no booking.
• It knows your crew. Capacity comes from the roster you already keep rather than a number you typed once and forgot.

Take bookings from your public page

With booking on, your public page offers real times. A customer picks one, and depending on your setting it is either confirmed instantly or held for you to approve.

If they are outside your service area, they can still describe the work and it reaches you as a request — see Requests and booking.

Let an existing client book, move or cancel

A client you already have gets their own link to the same booking. A request through it arrives filed against their record rather than creating a second copy of somebody you already know.

They can also call off a visit from the page that tracks it. That is the call that otherwise never gets made — and the van goes anyway.

Recognize a returning caller

Where the phone add-on is active, Recognize returning customers on the phone lets a caller you already know be identified from their number, so they are not asked for details you already hold.