How to use Appointments

This guide walks through each screen in the order you will actually meet them. Everything lives under Appointments in the left sidebar; which entries you see depends on your role permissions.

1. The dashboard — your morning screen

Open Appointments → Dashboard. It is built to answer three questions from top to bottom.

The readouts

Three figures across the top: total appointments ever taken, pending appointments waiting for somebody to approve them, and active services currently on sale.

Up next

The bookings that have not started yet, soonest first, each with how long is left (in 25 min, Tomorrow 10:00, then a date), the time slot, the service and the provider's avatar. Click any row to open that booking.

If it says nothing is booked, that is the honest answer — not an error.

Booking pressure

One bar per day for the next fortnight. The taller the bar, the more is booked. Today is marked with a pill. Days you are closed and declared holidays are drawn as dashed outlines rather than empty bars, so a quiet Sunday does not read as a lost opportunity. The line underneath counts the open days that still have nothing on them — that is your sellable capacity.

Hover any bar to see the date, how many bookings it holds and how much time they take.

Provider load this week

Each provider's booked hours for the current week, with a bar showing what share of their open hours that is: green while there is room, amber as it fills, red at 80% and above. Capacity follows exactly the same rules the booking page applies, so the percentage is what clients can really book into. A provider with no weekly hours set shows their booked hours without a percentage, because there is nothing honest to compare them to.

Use it to spot the two problems a diary always has: somebody drowning, and somebody idle.

The bookings list

Underneath sits one filterable table of bookings. It opens on today. Three filters change what it shows:

• Status — the tab strip on the left: All, Pending, Approved, Finished, Cancelled, Rejected.
• Type — the tab strip on the right: all types, bookings that came in through the public Booking Form, or ones a member of staff added by hand (External).
• Date range — the two date buttons above the table. Change them to look at any period; clear them to see everything.

Each row carries the id, the meeting purpose, the client, the service, the provider, the date and time, the type, the payment state and the status — plus buttons to open the client's public link, edit the booking or delete it.

2. Approving and managing a booking

A booking arrives as pending. Somebody has to decide about it.

1. Open Appointments → Appointments (or click the row on the dashboard).
2. Click the meeting purpose to open the full booking: who booked, their contact details, the service, the provider, the slot, what they wrote, and the payment card.
3. To change anything, use the edit button. You can move the date and time, change the service or the provider, adjust the purpose and overview, and set the status.
4. Set the status to Approved to confirm it. The client is emailed, and the event in the provider's connected calendar changes from tentative to confirmed.
5. Cancelled or Rejected tells the client and removes the event from the provider's calendar. Finished is for a meeting that has happened.

If you switched on approve the booking as soon as it is paid, a paid booking approves itself and you only have to touch the exceptions.

Adding a booking yourself

Click Add appointment on the bookings list or the dashboard. Fill in the client's name, email, phone and organisation, choose the service, provider, date and times, and save. These are recorded as type External so you can always tell them apart from ones clients made themselves. A staff-made booking is never auto-cancelled for being unpaid — you booked it on purpose.

3. The calendar view

Open Appointments → Calendar for the whole facility's diary in month, week or day view. Bookings are colour-coded by status: amber for pending, green for approved, blue for finished and red for cancelled or rejected. Each event is labelled with its service and the meeting purpose, and clicking it opens the booking.

Use the calendar to see shape and clashes; use the dashboard list to work through a queue.

4. Services — what clients can actually book

Open Appointments → Services. This screen decides everything the public page offers.

1. Click Add service.
2. Title and description are what the client reads, so write them for the client, not for your team.
3. Duration in minutes decides how much diary one booking takes. A 90-minute service will never be offered in a gap of 60 minutes.
4. Price drives checkout. Zero means free and no payment is ever requested.
5. Payment required to book makes this service insist on payment even if your workspace setting says payment is optional. Use it for the services you have been burned on.
6. Assigned providers is the list of team members a client may choose. Assign at least one, or the service cannot be booked.
7. Status takes a service off sale without deleting it — set it to inactive instead of deleting, so existing bookings keep their history.

5. Provider Hours — when each person is open

1. Open Appointments → Provider Hours. Every staff member is listed with whether they follow the company default or have their own week.
2. Click a provider to open their weekly grid.
3. For each day, leave Company Default to inherit the workspace opening hours, or switch it off and set that day's own start and end time.
4. To make a day unbookable for that person, mark it unavailable.
5. Save.

Set the company default once in the settings and only override the people who genuinely differ. It is far less to maintain than filling in seven rows for everyone.

6. Holidays — the days nobody works

1. Open Appointments → Holidays and click Add holiday.
2. Pick the date, name it, and save. That date is closed for every provider.

Weekly closed days (Saturday, Sunday) belong in Settings → Opening hours → Closed on. Holidays are for the one-off dates: public holidays, the Christmas shutdown, the day of the office move.

7. Payments

Open Appointments → Payments (visible once online payment is enabled and you have the permission). It lists every payment attempt across the workspace with its booking, client, gateway, amount, status and date, filterable by period and by state.

• Re-check asks the gateway again about a payment it never came back about. Use this rather than guessing — the gateway is the authority, not the browser.
• Mark as paid records cash or a bank transfer against a booking.
• The booking's own page carries a payment card where you can copy a payment link to send to the client yourself.

A booking that had to be paid and was not is released automatically once the hold expires, and the slot goes back on sale.

8. Calendar Sync — connecting your own calendar

Every staff member can do this for themselves once an administrator has switched calendar sync on.

1. Open Appointments → Calendar Sync.
2. Click Connect next to Google or Microsoft.
3. Approve the permission request. It authorises whichever account is signed in to that browser — if you have several, check before you approve.
4. From then on your bookings appear in your own calendar, and your existing calendar events stop being offered as free slots.
5. Disconnect at any time. Administrators can see and disconnect any provider's connection.

9. The public booking page

Your clients see four steps. Copy the link from Settings → Booking page → Link and try it yourself before you publish it.

1. Select a service — title, description, duration and price.
2. Select a provider — only those assigned to that service.
3. Select a date and time — only genuinely free slots, shown in the visitor's own timezone.
4. Your information — name, email, phone, organisation and what the meeting is about. Submitting creates the booking.

A priced service then goes to checkout. Afterwards the client lands on their own tracking page: a private link showing the status, the details and the payment state, with no login. That link is also the first button on every row of your bookings list, so you can see exactly what the client sees.

Testing it end to end before you publish

1. Create one active service with a duration, no price, and yourself as the provider.
2. Open the public link in a private browser window and book the earliest slot.
3. Check the booking appears on the dashboard under Up next and in the bookings list as pending, type Booking Form.
4. Approve it, and confirm the client email arrives and the event lands in your calendar if you connected one.
5. Only then add a price and repeat the test with a real gateway in test mode.

Where things are, at a glance