Building your appointment service catalogue

Appointment services

Open Services (/dashboard/appointment-services). This catalogue powers the public flow, staff bookings, and reporting.

What this covers: the main fields on each service, how variants work, when overrides help, and how Stripe Connect fits in.

Core fields everyone should set

• Name & description – guest-facing clarity beats clever marketing jargon.
• Duration – drives slot length on the calendar.
• Buffer / processing – quiet time before or after the appointment so you are not double-booked back-to-back.
• Price & deposits – optional; pair with payment requirement (none, deposit, or full payment online).
• Colour – helps teams scan the calendar quickly.
• Active – toggles visibility without deleting history.
• Sort order – controls the order guests see in long lists.

Booking windows (per service)

Fine-tune how far ahead guests may book, minimum notice, cancellation notice, and whether same-day bookings are allowed. Heavy services can require more notice than quick add-ons. Set each service the way you run the diary in real life.

Booking interval and start times

This decides which times guests see. Each service picks one of two modes.

Repeat every few minutes suits most businesses. Set an interval, say 15 minutes, and slots run through the whole day at :00, :15, :30 and :45. If you only want part of each hour, tick Restrict start times within each hour and tap the minutes you want, for example on the hour and quarter past only.

Fixed times of day suits businesses that take a handful of bookings a day at set times. A piano tuner who does four jobs a day might offer 9:20, 11:30, 1:45 and 3:30. Those times do not repeat neatly every hour, so an interval cannot produce them.

To set fixed times:

1. Open the service and find Booking interval & start times.
2. Choose Fixed times of day.
3. Enter your first time, then use + Add a time for each of the others.
4. Save. Guests now see only those times.

A few things worth knowing:

• Your fixed times still sit inside your opening hours, the calendar's working hours, and any custom schedule. A shorter day simply offers fewer of them.
• If a time is too late in the day for the appointment to finish before you close, it is not offered.
• Times already booked disappear, so four fixed times means at most four bookings a day per calendar.
• If you set times closer together than the appointment takes, we warn you. That is fine when a calendar takes more than one client at a time, and a mistake otherwise.
• Your interval settings are kept, so you can switch back at any time without setting them up again.

Want different times on different days? Combine the two. Set your fixed times here, then use custom availability below to shorten the days that need it. Fixed times of 9:20, 11:30, 1:45 and 3:30 with a Saturday window of 9:00 to 12:00 gives you 9:20 and 11:30 on Saturdays, and all four on other days.

Variants (sub-options)

When a service offers multiple lengths or styles (for example “Cut & blow dry” vs “Cut only”), add variants. Guests must pick a variant before times appear, which keeps availability accurate.

Link services to calendars

After saving the service, make sure it is offered on the right calendars. Admins can link a service to any active team calendar; staff can only link or adjust services on calendars they manage. On the service card, linked calendars appear as small pills so you can quickly see who offers the service.

Custom availability

Use the custom availability editor when a service is only offered on certain days or windows that do not match your usual template. The calendar will honour those exceptions after you save.

This works alongside Booking interval and start times above: that decides which times of day are offered, and this decides which days and hours they are offered in.

Staff overrides

Allow selected team members to advertise their own duration, price, or description. When two sources disagree, the app walks you through an override modal so you know which values guests will see.

Stripe Connect

Online payments require a completed Stripe Connect onboarding (Settings → Payments). If Connect is incomplete, the product warns you when a service expects card payments. Finish Connect before promoting those services online.

Hygiene tips

• Start with a small set of live services; duplicate rows when you add seasonal menus.
• Align cancellation copy with what you promise in Communications templates (see Communications).