The diary

How free time is worked out

There is no list of slots anywhere. Every time offered to a customer is calculated at the moment they look, from:

• the branch's opening hours,
• that person's working hours within them,
• minus any one-off change to their hours that day,
• minus appointments already booked, plus their buffers, plus travel time if it is a home visit,
• minus anything marked busy in that stylist's own Google Calendar,
• minus slots being held right now by somebody halfway through checkout.

This is why a rota change takes effect immediately, and why nothing ever needs regenerating. It is also why the honest way to stop bookings is to change the hours rather than to block the day out with a fake appointment.

Taking a booking over the phone

1. Diary → Walk-in

   The same dialog takes a booking for later as well as somebody standing in front of you: pick the customer, or type a new phone number and name.

2. Choose the services

   More than one is fine: a cut and a colour in one visit is one appointment made of two items, and the diary chains them so they cannot overlap each other.

3. Choose who and when

   Only genuinely free times are offered. If a time you expect is missing, it is being blocked by something — a buffer, a busy block from a calendar, or hours that end earlier than you think.

Walk-ins

Somebody who arrives without an appointment does not need a booking at all — open a bill on the Till and ring it up. Use Walk-in in the diary instead when they will be in the chair for a while and you want that time blocked so nobody books over it.

Moving, cancelling, not turning up

• Reschedule creates the new appointment and links it to the old one, so the history says what happened rather than losing the original.
• Cancel is in the same menu, for the same reason. The customer is messaged, and whether it was inside your cancellation window is recorded — which is what lets you tell a courteous cancellation from a late one later.
• No-show is recorded against the customer. It is not a punishment, it is a fact you will want when the same person books bridal work.

Blocking time out

Block time in the diary holds a stylist's time for something that is not a customer — training, a supplier, a wedding they are attending. It behaves exactly like an appointment as far as availability is concerned, and it does not appear on any bill.

For a whole day off, a schedule exception under Settings → Hours is tidier: it says why, and it does not clutter the day with a fake booking.

The waiting list

When somebody wants a time you have not got, Waiting list records what they wanted: the service, the person if they have a preference, the day, and the earliest and latest they could come.

When a booking is cancelled, the people whose window that slot falls into are messaged that it has come free. Nothing is booked automatically — the first to answer gets it, which is how it works at the desk anyway.

Home visits

A customer choosing a home visit picks one of your service areas, and the travel time for that area is blocked before and after the appointment on top of any buffers. The travel fee is added to the bill. Both are snapshotted onto the appointment, so changing an area's fee next month does not restate what a past visit cost.

Deposits and pending bookings

If you ask for deposits, a booking made on your page is pending until the money arrives, and the slot is held meanwhile. If it is not paid in time the hold expires and the time goes back on sale — with no message to the customer, because nothing was promised to them.

A pending booking that has been paid becomes confirmed on its own, including when the money lands minutes later, after the customer has closed the page. See Taking payments.

Messages that go out on their own

• Confirmation, as soon as a booking is made.
• A reminder the day before, and another an hour before.
• A message when a booking is cancelled or moved.
• The stylist is told about their own new bookings and cancellations.
• A review request after a visit — once, and only to customers who agreed to hear from you.
• A nudge when somebody is about due for their next visit, judged by how often they actually come rather than by one number for everybody, and a note to somebody you have not seen in a long while. Both are switched on under Settings → Coming back, both need the customer's consent, and an opt-out silences them.

Every one of these goes through a queue rather than being sent while somebody waits, so a provider being down delays a message and never fails a booking. Retries never send twice.