Create an appointment type

Your customers never see this field. It is the fixed reference that stays the same when you rename or translate the service later, and the one integrations, exports and invoices use to recognise it. Pick something you will still understand in a year, and keep it short.

The colour comes back as a dot in your calendar and in the overview. Give similar services deliberately different colours and you can read your week at a glance.

Write what the customer is looking for, not what you call it internally. “Boiler maintenance” beats “Maintenance type B”.

This is where you stop customers calling ahead: what is included, what they need to have ready, when it takes longer.

Customers see your booking page in their own language. If theirs is missing, Schedulinq falls back to a language you did fill in — the service never disappears, but a translation reads better.

New appointment types deliberately start at No, so you can set things up without bookings arriving mid-way. Services you only schedule yourself stay at No; you and your team can still plan them by hand.

The duration decides how much time is blocked in the calendar and which slots a customer is offered. Be realistic: too short and your day runs over, too generous and you undersell yourself.

Set this to No when the duration raises more questions than it answers. The appointment still occupies the same time in your calendar and the customer still sees a start and end time in the confirmation.

For work you have to prepare — parts to order, a quote to draw up. Set to 3 days, someone booking today sees the first free time three days from now. It applies to invitations too. How it combines with your booking rules is in Duration and availability.

Schedulinq only looks for free slots in these people's calendars. Tick nobody and there are no available times, so the service cannot be booked online.

Servicing a boiler is a different job from servicing a heat pump. When you schedule this service, the form only offers the customer's objects of a ticked type. If the appointment already names an object of another type, the form says so underneath and only saves once you pick another object or None.

Categories organise both your own overview and the list your customer picks from. From about ten services onwards it saves your customer real searching.

This decides which address ends up in the appointment and the confirmation, and whether travel time is planned. If you offer the service in more than one way, tick them all and let the customer choose when booking. A call asks for no address and costs no travel time. For a phone call the booking page always asks for the customer's phone number, even if you hid that field on the details step — you are the one calling.

Not every branch offers every service. If nobody who performs the service works at a chosen location, Schedulinq warns you — add a schedule there first.

Once every area lists its own services, a new service is served by none of them until you add it somewhere — and a customer cannot book it at any address. The form then warns you: No service area serves this service. Better to read that here than to hear it from a customer.

If you mostly work for consumers you think in amounts including VAT; for business customers, excluding. Both amounts are stored either way, so this only changes how you type.

This amount appears on your booking page and on the invoice. A wrong rate here carries through your whole invoicing, so check it per service when in doubt.

Choose From for work whose final price depends on what you find on site. The customer knows what they are getting into without you committing to an amount you cannot hold.

HEIC is the format an iPhone shoots in by default, so you can upload a photo straight off your phone without converting it first.