What is Appointments?

Appointments is the online booking and scheduling App built into NIZU Cloud WorkSpace. It turns your workspace into a scheduling engine: you publish the services you sell, your clients pick a service, a provider and a free time slot on a public booking page, pay online if the service has a price, and the confirmed booking appears in the assigned provider's own Google or Outlook calendar.

It is not a separate product bolted on the side. Providers are your existing team members, access is governed by your existing roles and permissions, the emails are your existing email templates, and the money is taken through the payment credentials the workspace already holds. Nothing is entered twice and nothing is stored in a second place.

What Appointments does, in short

• A public booking page. A four-step flow — service, provider, date and time, your details — carrying your own brand name and colour, working in the visitor's own timezone, with no account required.
• Real availability, not a wish list. Free slots are generated from the workspace opening hours, the provider's own weekly hours, the length of the service, the bookings already taken, the holidays you declared and the provider's external calendar.
• Online payment. A priced service sends the client straight to Stripe Checkout or Mollie and back to a confirmed booking. Payment can be required before a booking is confirmed, or optional.
• Two-way calendar sync. Bookings are written into each provider's own Google Calendar or Microsoft (Outlook) calendar, and the times they are already busy stop being offered.
• A manager's dashboard. What is coming next, how full the next fortnight is, how the load is spread across providers, and one filterable list of every booking.
• Notifications that arrive. Five editable email templates, automatic reminders a configurable time before the appointment, and an optional instant Telegram alert on every new booking.

How a booking actually works

1. A visitor opens your public booking page and picks a service — each one has its own duration, price and list of providers who can deliver it.
2. They pick a provider from the ones assigned to that service.
3. They pick a date and time. Only genuinely free slots are shown.
4. They leave their details and submit. The booking is created as pending.
5. If the service has a price and online payment is on, they are taken to checkout. Payment status is always re-read from the gateway, never trusted from the browser.
6. Your team gets an email (and optionally a Telegram message); the client gets a confirmation with a private tracking link that shows the status, the details and the payment state without any login.
7. A member of staff approves the booking — or it is approved automatically the moment it is paid, if you switched that on.
8. The event is written to the provider's connected calendar, and a reminder goes out before the appointment.

Core ideas

• Availability is computed, never stored. There is no separate slot table to fall out of sync. Every free slot is derived at the moment it is asked for, from the rules in force right then.
• A payment is only paid when the gateway says so. The return URL and the webhook supply an identifier and nothing else; the amount is verified against the price before a booking is marked as paid.
• An abandoned checkout must not cost you the slot. A booking that had to be paid and was not is released after a hold you configure, so the time goes back on sale.
• The provider's calendar is the provider's. Each staff member connects their own Google or Microsoft account; the administrator supplies the application credentials once and never touches an individual's account.
• Every workspace is isolated. NIZU gives each company its own database, so one company's bookings, clients and prices can never surface in another's.

Who is it for?

Any business that sells time. Consultancies and agencies taking discovery calls; clinics, therapists and salons; trainers, coaches and tutors; garages, surveyors and inspectors; recruiters running interview slots; and internal teams that simply need a bookable diary. If you already invoice, manage projects or run support tickets in NIZU, the diary now lives in the same place as the work that follows the meeting.

What makes it different from a standalone booking tool

Standalone schedulers are excellent at scheduling and then stop. They charge per user, they hold your client list in their own database, and everything that happens after the meeting — the quote, the project, the invoice, the support ticket — lives somewhere else and has to be re-typed or wired up with integrations.

Appointments starts from the other end. It is a feature of the system that already knows your team, your clients, your permissions, your currency and your payment provider. Adding a provider is not a new seat to pay for; it is a team member you already have. And because the whole workspace runs on one database per company, the booking and the invoice that follows it are two records in the same system rather than two systems to reconcile.

Frequently asked

Do clients need an account to book?

No. The public booking page is open, and each booking gets its own private tracking link that needs no login.

Can different staff have different working hours?

Yes. There is a workspace-wide opening time, closing time and slot length, and each provider can either follow that company default or set their own hours day by day, including marking a day as unavailable.

Can I stop bookings on specific dates?

Yes, in two ways: recurring closed days of the week (for example Saturday and Sunday), and individual holiday dates that block every provider.

Is taking payment required?

No. Online payment is off until you switch it on, a service with no price never asks for money, and even with payment enabled you can decide whether the booking waits for payment or is confirmed anyway. An individual service can insist on payment on its own.

Which payment providers are supported?

Stripe and Mollie. Stripe uses the credentials already in Settings → Payment Methods → Stripe; Mollie uses the ones held by the Mollie Payment Gateway App. Cash and bank transfers can be recorded by hand.

Does it work in other languages?

Yes. Appointments ships with translations for English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Czech, Greek and Norwegian, and follows each user's own language setting.

Why it matters

A booking is the start of a piece of work, not the end of one. Appointments exists so that the moment a client picks a time, everything that follows — the provider's calendar, the payment, the reminder, the record, and eventually the invoice — is already in the same system, with nobody re-typing anything.