Send invitations
Let the customer pick a time instead of you picking one for them — and follow what happens next.
With an invitation you decide what happens and who may do it, and the customer decides when. You send the invitation, the customer books a time that suits them, and the appointment lands in your calendar.
Step by step
Open Invitations
In the left-hand menu, click Appointments → Invitations. You see every invitation you have sent. The screen opens on Pending — the ones you can still expect something from.
Here the filter is set to All, so every status is visible.
Choose the kind of invitation
Click New invitation at the top right. Schedulinq first asks what kind of invitation this is.
One appointment is the usual choice: the customer books a single service. Several appointments is for a customer taking several services back to back on the same day — that gets its own guide.
Fill in the invitation
Search for the customer by name. From the first few letters you get a list with the email address and address alongside, so two customers with the same name stay apart.
Pick the service
The appointment type asks where the appointment happens first, and only then which service it is.
That surprises people the first time — you expect a list of services straight away. The reason is that not every service is offered everywhere: by choosing the place first, what follows is only the services that can actually happen there.
Send it
Click Send invitation at the top right. The customer immediately receives an email with a link to pick a time themselves.
The fields worth explaining
Who should this appointment be scheduled with?
RequiredTick the team members the customer can be booked with. The customer is only offered times when at least one of them is free.
Tick everyone and the customer will nearly always find a slot — but the appointment can land with a colleague who does not do this work. Tick one person and their calendar becomes the bottleneck. Tick whoever can genuinely do the job, no more and no less.
Required team members per appointment
Default: 1How many people need to be there at the same time.
Set this to 2 for work you cannot do alone. Schedulinq then only offers the customer times when two of the ticked people are actually free — otherwise they book a slot that leaves you short-handed.
Address
PrefilledTaken from the customer record. You can change it here for this one invitation.
The customer's saved address does not change with it. Useful when the customer is somewhere else just this once; if they have actually moved, change it on the customer record instead, or the next appointment will be wrong again.
Internal note
OptionalVisible only to you and your team — the customer never sees it.
Whatever you write here is carried into the appointment as soon as the customer books. That makes it the place for "gate is locked, ring at no. 12" — what the colleague going there actually needs.
What happens next
Open an invitation to see where it stands.
On the right, under Communication, you see what has been sent and what is still scheduled. Those messages come from your communication steps — you do not set them per invitation, but once for your whole business.
Actions at the top right resends the invitation or deletes it.
The four statuses
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Pending | Sent, the customer has not booked yet |
| Used | The customer booked — there is now an appointment in your calendar |
| Expired | Schedulinq has stopped sending reminders |
| Cancelled | The invitation was withdrawn |
Frequently asked questions
I want to invite the same customer for the same service again. You can. Schedulinq warns you that there is already an open invitation and asks whether you are sure. If you continue, both stay valid and the customer can book with either. If that is not what you want, delete the old one first.
The customer says there are no times available. Then no time is free with the ticked team members. Check whether enough people are ticked, whether Required team members per appointment is not set too high, and whether those people have working hours in the period the customer is looking at.
Can I pick a time myself instead of the customer? Yes — then you do not create an invitation but an appointment in the calendar directly.
Does changing the address here change the customer's address? No. An address changed on the invitation applies to this appointment only.