Booking rules and appointment IDs
How far ahead people can book, notice periods, and what your reference numbers look like.
The rules for taking every appointment live on one page: Settings › Booking rules. They decide how much notice a customer has to give, how finely times are offered, whether a new booking is confirmed straight away, and what your reference numbers look like. The same page holds where customers land after they book, the default deposit, group bookings and bundles, and the blocklist. One more setting that identifies you afterwards — the name on a customer’s bank statement — lives on the Payments screen.
Where the booking rules live
Open Booked in the WordPress sidebar, click Settings under System, then choose Booking rules under Taking bookings in the rail on the left. The first card is Taking a booking.
How far ahead people can book, how fine the slots are, and what happens the moment a booking lands.
How far ahead a customer has to book. Staff are never held to it — you can still book somebody in at the counter for ten minutes’ time — and a service can ask for more or less than this.
Asked right now, the soonest a customer could book is Tue 29 Sept at 10:15.
The steps the booking form offers times in. Finer steps fill gaps; coarser ones keep the diary tidy.
The Taking a booking card, at the top of Booking rules.
- 1Booking rules — under Taking bookings in the settings rail.
- 2Least notice you’ll take — how far ahead a customer has to book, in minutes, hours or days, up to four weeks. It starts at 0, meaning no notice. Staff are never held to it, and a service can ask for more or less with Least notice on its General tab. The line underneath says the soonest a customer could book right now.
- 3Time slot interval — the steps the booking form offers times in: 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes, or 1 hour. It starts at 15 minutes.
- 4Auto-approve new bookings — off to start with, so a booking that is not paid for online arrives Pending.
- 5Let staff override availability — off to start with. Switch it on to let staff double-book or use a closed day from the diary.
Press Save at the top, or Save changes in the bar that appears at the bottom once you change something. It stores every change you have made in Settings, on any section. Nothing takes effect until you do.
Pending or Confirmed — what a new booking does
Out of the box, Auto-approve new bookings is off. A booking made on your form arrives as Pending and waits for someone to approve it, and the customer gets the Booking pending email. Switch it on and every booking is Confirmed the moment it is made, with the Booking approved email instead.
Paying online settles it either way. When a customer pays a deposit or the full price at the card step, Booked marks the booking paid, moves it to Confirmed and sends Booking approved, whatever auto-approve is set to. Your customer sees the difference on the last step of the booking form.
The final step of the booking form, with auto-approve switched off.
- 1“Your booking is requested” — what the customer sees when the booking is waiting for you: auto-approve is off and nothing was paid online. With auto-approve on, or once an online payment has gone through, the same screen reads “Your booking is confirmed”.
- 2Reference — the appointment’s reference. It is the first thing a customer quotes when they ring up, so it is worth branding (see below).
Screening questions can hold a booking back. If a customer’s answers are Flagged for review, the booking always arrives Pending, however auto-approve is set, so you look at it yourself. Answers that rule someone out stop the booking before it is made. See Screening questions.
A booking that was Pending but has since been paid is also moved to Confirmed by Sync payments (the round-arrow button beside Walk-in on the Bookings toolbar), which runs quietly every time you open the Bookings screen.
Leave auto-approve off if you screen people, take NHS referrals or need to check stock before committing. Turn it on if a slot in the diary is a promise you always keep.
Which times get offered, and how far ahead
Least notice you’ll take sets the soonest a customer can book: with 1 day, somebody looking at 10:15 on Monday can book from 10:15 on Tuesday. The cutoff moves with the clock rather than striking out whole days. There is no setting for how far ahead people can book; they can book as far ahead as your hours allow. To offer a service only in certain months or on certain days, give it an availability window instead (see Seasonal services).
Beyond the notice, what a customer is offered is worked out from your diary, so if the times look wrong, these are the places to check.
| What decides it | Where you change it |
|---|---|
| The days and hours the branch is open | Locations › the branch › Opening hours |
| The hours that member of staff works, and their time off | Staff › the person › Hours & time off |
| Lunch, admin and other blocked time | Breaks, added from the Diary or on the member of staff |
| How long the appointment takes, plus its clean-down time | Services › the service › General — Length and Gap after |
A start time is only offered when the branch is open, that person is working, and nothing else is booked or blocked for the whole appointment and the gap after it. Time slot interval then decides how finely those hours are chopped up: at 15 minutes a customer sees 09:00, 09:15, 09:30; at 30 they see 09:00 and 09:30 only. A wider interval gives you tidier days and fewer awkward gaps; a narrower one fills more of the diary. The same interval sets the lines in the Diary and the steps you can pick in the booking editor. More on this in Length, gaps and slot times and No times showing.
Letting staff book outside the hours
With Let staff override availability off, a booking made or moved in the admin must land on a free time, just like a customer’s. The time picker still shows the taken times — amber for a break or outside the hours, red for another booking — but you cannot pick them, and Booked refuses to save one. A time that has already passed is treated as a record and is let through. Turning the switch on only ever loosens the admin inside Booked. It never lets a customer book a closed day or a taken slot on your public form.
With it on, the taken times become pickable, and an Another time picker lets you choose any hour and minute of the day, so you can genuinely double-book. Dragging a booking onto a clash in the Diary asks “Move it anyway?”. With it off, a drag onto a taken time leaves the booking where it was and says why. The change applies to the booking editor as soon as you save — no reload needed.
The rest of the page
- Record unfinished bookings. Keeps what somebody entered when they start a booking and stop, under Unfinished in the sidebar. With it on you choose how long to keep them: Forget an unfinished booking after 30 days to start with, anything from 1 to 365. See Unfinished bookings.
- After they book. Where a customer lands once the booking, and any payment, is done. Stay on the booking page is the default: the confirmation shows in the form itself. Go to a page of your own sends them to a page on your site that draws the booking with the [get_booked_confirmation] shortcode — a thank-you page you design, and an address your adverts can count conversions on. See Your own confirmation page.
- Deposits. The default deposit for every service: a percentage, a fixed amount or the full price. It stays locked until your payments are set up. See Deposits.
- More than one appointment. Group bookings lets one person book for several in one longer appointment, up to Most people in one booking (2 to 10). Appointment bundles lets people add other services, done back-to-back in the same visit. See Group bookings and Bundles and upsells.
- Blocked from booking. Email addresses, email domains, IP addresses and IP ranges that cannot book online. See Activity log and blocking bookers.
- How a booking lands. A panel beside the cards that spells out, step by step, what happens to a booking with the rules as they are on screen — before you save.
Your appointment reference
Every booking gets a reference built from three parts: what you put in Before the number, the booking’s own number padded to five digits, and what you put in After the number. Leave Before the number alone and you get the built-in GB-; clear it completely and references become just the number.
On every confirmation and receipt. The number in the middle keeps each one unique.
Booking references, further down Booking rules.
- 1Before the number and After the number — up to 12 characters each: letters, numbers, dots, hyphens and underscores. Anything else is dropped when you save. The number itself is Booked’s and cannot be changed.
- 2The example — how a reference will read with what you typed, at the top of the card.
The reference turns up wherever you need to join an appointment to money: at the top of the booking editor, on the customer’s confirmation screen and emails, and stamped on every card payment — so it appears in the Appointment column of your payments list and on any dispute, where it links straight back to the booking.
Changing it later is safe. Booked works out each reference when it shows it, so every booking in Booked takes on the new look at once, while emails already sent and payments already taken keep the old one. Booked matches on the number in the middle, so a payment with the old reference still opens the right appointment. One caveat: the search box on the Bookings screen does not look at references, so searching MER-00042 there finds nothing — use the customer’s name instead.
Because payments are matched on the digits inside a reference, five or more digits in a row before the number — 12345-, say — makes Booked latch onto the wrong number. Payments then attach to the wrong booking, or to none. Letters and a hyphen are the safe choice.
The name on your customer’s bank statement
This lives on the Payments screen, in the Bank statement name card. Statement name is the wording that appears on a card statement when someone pays for a booking through Booked Payments. Leave it blank and your account’s default is used. Set it to something a customer will recognise weeks later — your trading name, not your limited company name, and not an abbreviation only you understand.
This is the cheapest protection you have against a chargeback. The most common reason a bank gives for a dispute is Unrecognised charge, and it is usually not fraud at all — it is someone squinting at a line on their statement that means nothing to them. Getting the name right stops the case before it starts, which matters because the card network’s dispute fee is charged win or lose.
It holds up to 22 characters. On save, the characters < > \ ' " * are removed and repeated spaces collapse to one. If what is left is under 5 characters or contains no letters at all, the whole thing is discarded and stored blank — so 1234 silently becomes nothing. Save, then look at the field again to confirm it kept what you typed.
Cancellations and your own policy
There is no cancellation window to configure. You cancel a booking by setting its Status to Cancelled and saving, or with Cancel booking in its quick actions. That sends the Booking cancelled email and frees the slot immediately, so somebody else can take it — and with the waiting list on, the next person waiting for that time is offered it. Be sure before you do it. It does not refund anything; that is a separate step (see Refunds).
Customers can cancel only if you let them. Under Settings › Customer accounts, cancelling is off to start with; switch it on and a signed-in customer can cancel any appointment that has not yet started, giving a reason. No notice period is enforced there either. See Customer accounts.
Because the software does not enforce a notice period, your written policy is doing the work. Have one, publish it, and keep the wording to hand — if a payment is ever disputed, the response form has optional Refund policy and Cancellation policy boxes, and they are often the most persuasive evidence you can send.