Creating a booking

Plenty of work still arrives by phone, by text, or because someone stopped you in the street. Creating a booking by hand takes about twenty seconds.

Press New booking from either the Schedule page or the Bookings page.

The steps

1. The customer. Search for an existing customer, or add a new one on the spot. This is the only thing a booking genuinely requires. Everything else can be filled in later.

2. The service. Pick what they are booking. You can skip this and add services on the booking page afterwards, which is handy when someone has called and you are still working out what the job involves.

Depending on what you sell and what you picked, a few more steps may follow:

Job or quote visit. If the service is one you sometimes go out and price rather than perform, you will be asked which this is. A job means you are doing the work. A quote visit means you are going out to look at it and will send a proposal afterwards. Same service, two very different afternoons.

The property. For work done at the customer's place, choose which of their addresses this is for. A customer can have several: a house, a rental, a shop.

Pickup and delivery. For hire, say whether the customer is collecting or you are delivering, and where.

Repeat. If this is a standing arrangement rather than a one-off, set the rhythm here and Bookables will keep the future visits coming. See Recurring bookings.

The class session. Booking someone into a class works differently: you are taking a seat in a session that already exists, so you pick the session and you are done. There is nothing to schedule.

Finishing the booking off

The wizard gets you a booking. The booking page is where you finish it: set the time, add more services, assign someone, add notes, take a payment.

While you are doing that the booking sits in Planning. When it is right, press Confirm. That is what moves it to Scheduled and makes it real.

Tip: Do not feel you have to complete everything in the dialog. Get the customer in, press through, and finish the detail on the booking page where you have more room.

Bookings that come to you

Bookings made by customers on your public booking page arrive on their own, already scheduled against your real availability. You do not need to do anything to accept them. See Your online booking page.

What is next

Next: Rescheduling and cancelling.