Taking your first booking

What your customer sees, where the booking lands, and how to manage it.

This is the part that makes everything else worthwhile. Here is what happens when a customer books, what arrives on your side, and what to do next.

What your customer sees

Your booking page walks the customer through a short sequence. Which steps appear depends on what you sell:

  1. The address, if you travel to your customers. Bookables checks it against the areas you cover before anything else, so nobody wastes their time.
  2. The service, from your catalogue, with any add-ons.
  3. A time, chosen from slots that genuinely fit around your existing work, your staff and your travel. If nothing fits, they can send a request instead.
  4. Their contact details.
  5. Payment, if the service is paid for up front.
  6. Confirmation, with everything they have just booked.

Where the booking lands

Depending on how the customer finished, you get one of three things:

  • A confirmed booking, which appears in Bookings and on your Schedule straight away.
  • A request, which lands in your Inbox for you to review and confirm.
  • A proposal, for work you quote rather than price up front, which you will find under Proposals.

Tip: Keep an eye on your Inbox. Answering requests quickly is one of the easiest ways to win work off the business down the road.

Booking a job yourself

Plenty of work still arrives by phone. Press New booking from either the Schedule or the Bookings page, then pick the customer, the service and a time. See Creating a booking.

Managing the job through to done

Every booking has its own page, with a progress bar across the top.

A booking starts in Planning while you are putting it together, and becomes Scheduled when you press Confirm. After that it moves through stages that suit the kind of work: on route and on site for a mobile job, checked in for an appointment, in use and returned for a hire. Each stage has a button telling you the next thing to do.

Along the way you can add services, take a payment, reschedule, or call it off. See Booking stages and statuses.

Tell your customers what is happening

Bookables can send confirmations, reminders and on-my-way messages automatically, but none of them are switched on to begin with. Nothing goes to your customers until you say so.

That is worth doing today rather than next month. Go to Settings, then Notifications, and turn on booking confirmations and booking reminders at the very least. See Choosing what gets sent.

You are live

That is the whole loop: set up your business, add a service, share your page, take a booking. From here, explore the rest of the guide: