There are two ways an appointment gets into the calendar: somebody at the shop puts it there, or a customer books it themselves from your public page. Both produce the same appointment; the second one also produces the paperwork.
Appointments you book yourself
Create one from the calendar, from an order's sidebar, or from a customer or vehicle page. It needs a start and an end, and it can carry a customer, a vehicle and an order — or none of them, which is how you block out a morning for a delivery or a staff meeting.
Appointments move through their own statuses, separate from the order's:
| Status | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Scheduled | Booked in, not confirmed with the customer. |
| Confirmed | The customer has confirmed they're coming. |
| Checked in | Vehicle is here. |
| In progress | Being worked on. |
| Completed | Done. |
| No show | They didn't turn up. Worth recording — it's a real pattern. |
| Canceled | Called off. |
You can assign technicians to an appointment, reschedule it, and cancel it without deleting it. Rescheduling and assignment both notify the technicians concerned in their own language.
Note
An appointment carrying an order is linked to it both ways: the order's sidebar shows the next appointment, and the appointment opens the order. Booking a return visit from the order is usually quicker than starting from the calendar.
The public booking page
Turn it on under Settings → Appointment Scheduler. Your page then lives at a public URL of its own that you can put on your website, in your email signature or on a QR code in the waiting room. It needs no login and no account.
The page has a headline and description you write, and it lists the services you have chosen to offer online. Each bookable service carries:
- a duration, which is what actually reserves the slot;
- optional buffers before and after, for pulling the car in and cleaning up;
- a price you can show or hide — the booking page never takes payment, so a shown price is an indication, not a charge;
- whether it requires a vehicle and whether it requires an address.
How the slots are worked out
Availability is generated, not maintained by hand. Six things decide whether a given time appears:
Opening hours, per weekday
Each day is open or closed, with its own start and end and optionally its own slot interval. A closed day produces no slots at all.
Slot interval
Thirty minutes by default. This is the spacing between offered start times, not the length of the job.
Duration plus buffers
A slot must fit the service's duration and both buffers inside opening hours, or it is not offered.
Minimum notice
Two hours by default. Nothing is bookable inside that window, so nobody books a slot that starts while they're still typing.
How far ahead
Sixty days by default. Beyond that the calendar is closed.
Capacity, two ways
A cap on overlapping appointments per slot (two by default) and a cap per day (twenty by default). An all-day appointment closes the whole day regardless of the per-slot cap.
Warning
Everything above is evaluated in your shop's timezone, and the slot the customer picks is re-checked at the moment they submit. That second check is what stops two people who opened the page at the same time from taking the same slot.
What a booking creates
One submission, four records, all or nothing — if any part fails the whole booking is rolled back and marked rejected rather than half-created.
A customer
Matched to an existing customer where possible, created if not.
A vehicle
Matched or created under that customer, if the service asks for one.
An order
Created at estimate by default, with the booked service on it, so the job arrives on your board already priced-in-outline instead of as a note. You can turn this off, or point it at a different starting status.
The appointment itself
On the calendar, marked as coming from the scheduler, with the customer's own words attached.
Auto-confirm or review first
This is the setting worth thinking about.
- Automatic (the default) — the appointment lands as scheduled and the slot is taken. Fastest for the customer, and right for most shops.
- Manual review — the appointment lands as pending review and waits for you to Approve or Reject. The count of what's waiting is shown in the app so it can't quietly pile up.
Either way your team is notified that a booking came in.
Note
A booking made by someone signed in to their customer portal is linked to their account, so their next visit prefills and they can see the job's progress without you sending anything.
Reminders
Appointment reminders go out ahead of the visit — 24 hours before, by default — over email or WhatsApp, in the customer's own language.
They respect the customer's opt-ins, not their stated preference: email opt-in governs the email reminder and WhatsApp opt-in governs the WhatsApp one. See customers and vehicles for why those two switches are the ones that matter.
Troubleshooting
"A day I'm open shows no slots." Check that weekday is marked open under Settings → Appointment Scheduler, and that the service's duration plus its buffers actually fits between the open and close times.
"Customers can't book tomorrow morning." Minimum notice. At two hours a 9 a.m. slot closes at 7 a.m., and a longer notice period closes it the night before.
"A slot disappeared while a customer was choosing." Somebody took it, or the day hit its cap. The final availability check runs on submit for exactly this reason.
"Bookings aren't creating orders." Order creation from bookings is switched off in the scheduler settings, or the booking failed to resolve a customer.
"An appointment is stuck at pending review." You're on manual confirmation. Approve or reject it — until you do, the customer has no answer.
"The times are an hour out." Availability is computed in the shop's timezone. Set it on the shop profile, not on your own user account.