How your bookings work

Your website can take bookings on its own. It only offers the times you can really take, checks each booking again the moment it's made, and keeps your customers emailed along the way.

Only the times you're free

A time is offered only when all of these hold:

• It's inside your opening hours, or the person's own hours.
• It isn't in time off, for the whole business or for that person.
• The person isn't already booked then, or, with no team, the business isn't. Any break you set after a booking counts too.
• A class still has places.
• It isn't sooner than the notice you need, or further ahead than people can book.

What's left is what customers can pick. When someone books, the time is checked again at that moment, so two people can't take the same time.

Booked, or asked for

You choose how new bookings are made:

A request holds its time just as a confirmed booking does, so no one else can take it.

Your customers, kept in the loop

When someone books, they're emailed a confirmation, or a receipt for their request. They're emailed again when a booking is confirmed, declined, cancelled or moved. And they get a reminder before it, unless you choose Don't send one.

Where you set it up

1. 1

   In your website's settings, switch on Take bookings on this website.

2. 2

   Opening hours set when you take bookings, day by day, in your own time zone.

3. 3

   How bookings are made holds your rules: confirmed straight away or each one approved, the notice you need, how far ahead people can book, and how late they can change or cancel.

4. 4

   Services & team holds what customers can book, in the order your booking page shows them. Each person keeps your business's hours, or their own.

5. 5

   Bookings keeps them all, as a list, or on a calendar of the day or the week.

Take bookings on your website takes you through it step by step.

Why it works

Every booking is checked again the moment it's made, so two people can't take the same time. Customers are emailed when a booking is confirmed, moved or cancelled. And your rules hold, even when you're not looking.