Online booking fills the calendar while you sleep, but only if what it offers matches what the clinic can actually do. Everything on this page decides what a patient sees, what they must enter, and whether they pay.
Switch it on
Every clinic has a public booking page from day one; the setting is whether it's live. Open Settings, then Online Bookings. The switch at the top reads Online bookings active or inactive. While it's off, a patient who opens the page sees the Disabled state message you set below the switch (a title and a message, for example Bookings currently unavailable), so you can set everything up, share nothing yet, and switch on when ready. Save the page after any change.
Before switching on, three things have to be true or the page will show no times: at least one location takes bookings, at least one appointment type is bookable, and at least one practitioner is linked to that type, has Show in online scheduler on, and has working hours. The troubleshooting article walks through them.
General: the booking rules
- Daily limit per patient: 1 to 20 bookings a day for one patient, or Unlimited. A patient over the limit is told You've reached the maximum of 2 booking(s) per day for this clinic.
- Lead time for booking: the least notice you'll accept, from Now through hours up to 1 month. With 2 hours, a 10:00 slot stops being offered at 8:00. Choose something your front desk can live with for same-day arrivals.
- Advance booking window: how far ahead the calendar opens, from 1 day to 1 year. Keep it shorter than your practitioners' known rosters.
- Max bookings per time segment: a cap on online bookings in each morning (before 12:00), afternoon (12:00 to 17:00) and evening (from 17:00) per day, so walk-ins and phone bookings still have room. Leave it unlimited if you don't need it.
- Respect practitioner availability: on, patients are offered only times inside each practitioner's working hours and outside their breaks. Off, they're offered the location's opening hours from Business Information, or the clinic's calendar hours if the location has none. Closures and unavailable blocks are respected either way.
- Notification delivery: SMS, Email or Both for the booking confirmation and reminders that follow an online booking.
Patient page: what they see and agree to
- Show service prices and Show appointment duration on the list of appointment types. If you take deposits, prices show regardless at the payment step.
- Require patient address makes the address compulsory on the details step. Otherwise a patient needs a name and at least an email or a phone number.
- Allow patients to select their time zone, for clinics with telehealth patients elsewhere. The time they chose is shown beside the clinic's time on their cancellation page.
- Time selection info is extra text shown while they pick a time, such as parking instructions. Terms of use is text they must check before booking; the page refuses with Please agree to the terms before continuing otherwise. A Consent form goes further: the patient agrees to a real consent form template and the agreement is recorded on their patient record, where the terms agreement is not.
- Privacy policy URL links to your policy. Show important notice puts a dismissible notice with a title and message at the top of the page; use it for a temporary message such as a closure.
Availability: who and what can be booked
Active locations lists each location with two switches: Bookings, whether it takes online bookings at all, and Address, whether patients see its address. A clinic that doesn't publish a home-visit base turns the second off and the location still appears by name.
Appointment types lists every active type with its description; switch on the ones patients may choose. Group types never appear, whatever you switch on; they're booked by staff. When payment is required for online bookings, only services with a price are offered and a type with no price is hidden from the booking page, because there's nothing to take a deposit on; give every bookable type a price or items under its Billing settings. Without required payment, every online-bookable service is listed, priced or not, and nobody pays online.
Practitioners aren't listed here. A practitioner is offered when they're linked to the chosen type and Show in online scheduler is on in their practitioner settings under Online bookings.
Payments: take a deposit
Connect Stripe, PayPal or Square under Apps Integration first; until then the section only says so. Then switch on Require a deposit and set the Deposit percentage of the appointment type's price. The booking isn't made until the payment goes through.
The percentage is a minimum: on the payment step the patient can choose Pay in full instead. The card is only held while the booking is submitted and charged once it succeeds; if the slot is taken in the meantime the patient sees This time slot is no longer available. Please choose another. Your card has not been charged. A hold that is never completed is released within the hour. The deposit is recorded as a payment on the appointment's invoice, so what happens to it on cancellation follows the location's fee rules; see Cancel an appointment.
What the patient's booking looks like to you
The patient works through five steps: Location, Service, Practitioner, Date & time, Details. After they pick a location, the page lists only the services that someone bookable online provides at that location, and a location where nothing can be booked online isn't listed at all. If a service is missing for a location, check that a practitioner based there offers that service and is shown on online booking. A returning patient is matched to their existing record when the first and last name match and the email or phone number matches too; otherwise a new patient is created. An email on file is never replaced by one typed on the booking page, so a changed address has to be updated by staff. The booking lands on the calendar like any other, confirmations and linked forms go out by the chosen channel, and it's listed under Online activity on the dashboard for two days. The patient's confirmation carries a cancellation link governed by the clinic's minimum notice period.