Booking rules and appointment IDs
How far ahead people can book, notice periods, and what your reference numbers look like.
The global rules for every appointment live on one tab: Settings Booking rules. Three of them change what happens the moment someone books. Two more decide how your business is identified afterwards — on the confirmation screen your customer sees, and on their bank statement.
Where the booking rules live
Open Booked in the WordPress sidebar, click Settings at the foot of the Booked menu, then choose Bookings from the tab rail. The first card is Booking rules.
Configure how Booked works.
The Booking rules card, at the top of the Bookings tab.
- 1Save settings — nothing on this card takes effect until you press it. The same button also sits in a sticky bar at the foot of the screen.
- 2Bookings tab — booking rules, deposits, booking references, the bank statement name, bundles, group bookings and your blocklist all live here.
- 3Allow staff to override availability — off out of the box. It loosens the booking editor for your team only, never the public form.
- 4Auto-approve new bookings — also off out of the box, so every booking arrives as Pending until you turn this on.
- 5Time slot interval — 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes, or 1 hour. This is the step of the start-time grid, not the length of an appointment.
Save settings writes every change you have made across Company, Localisation, Bookings, Email & SMS, Tracking & Pixels and Add-ons in one go. The reverse is also true: leave the Settings screen without saving and you lose all of it, not just the tab you were looking at.
Pending or Confirmed — what a new booking does
Out of the box, Auto-approve new bookings is off. Every appointment lands as Pending and waits for someone to approve it — including one the customer has already paid for online. This catches out most people setting up for the first time, because a paid booking feels like a settled booking.
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” — the wording with auto-approve off. Switch it on and the same screen reads “Your booking is confirmed”, and the customer gets the Booking approved email straight away instead of Booking pending.
- 2Reference — the appointment ID. It is the first thing a customer quotes when they ring up, so it is worth branding (see below).
Two things override the setting. A booking whose screening answers came back Ineligible or Flagged for review always arrives Pending, however auto-approve is set — you should look at those yourself. And a booking that was Pending but has since been paid is moved to Confirmed by Sync payments, 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 on the calendar is a promise you always keep.
Which times get offered, and how far ahead
There is no setting in Booked for “at least four hours’ notice” or “no further than 60 days ahead”. What a customer is offered is worked out from your diary instead, so if the times look wrong, these are the four places to check.
| What decides it | Where you change it |
|---|---|
| The days and hours the branch is open | Business › Locations — each branch has its own hours |
| The hours that member of staff works | Business › Employees |
| Lunch, admin and other blocked time | Breaks, added from the Calendar or on the employee |
| How long the appointment takes, plus its clean-down time | Business › Services — duration and the buffer after |
A start time is only offered when it fits inside the branch’s opening hours and that person’s working hours for the day, and when the appointment plus its buffer finishes before closing. 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 is the snap size when you drag an appointment around in Quick edit on the Calendar.
Letting staff book outside the hours
Allow staff to override availability only ever loosens the booking editor inside Booked. It does not let a customer book a closed day or a taken slot on your public form — that door stays shut whatever this is set to.
With it on, closed days stay clickable in the date picker and Booked offers a fallback 08:00–20:00 window for them, marked with an amber Outside working hours (override). note. Slots already taken become selectable too, so you can genuinely double-book. With it off, closed days are greyed out as Closed and busy slots cannot be chosen at all. The change applies to the booking editor as soon as you press Save settings — no reload needed.
One thing the toggle does not affect: the Start time list has never known about staff breaks. It will offer you a slot over someone’s lunch even though the same break blocks the public form and is drawn on the calendar. Check the Calendar before you commit somebody.
Your appointment reference — prefix and suffix
Every booking gets a reference built from three parts: your Prefix, the booking’s own number padded to five digits, and your Suffix. Your very first booking is 00001. Leave the prefix alone and you get the built-in GB-; clear it completely and references become just the number.
Brand your appointment IDs. The number in the middle keeps every booking unique.
What customers see on their card statement for a payment. Leave blank to use your account’s default. 5–22 characters; letters, numbers and spaces only.
Booking references and Bank statement name, further down the Bookings tab.
- 1Prefix — up to 12 characters. Only letters, numbers, full stop, underscore and hyphen survive; spaces, #, /, ampersands and accents are stripped out on save without telling you.
- 2Suffix — the same 12-character limit and the same rules, added after the number. Most businesses leave it empty.
- 3Example — a live preview. Check it after saving, because it shows what you actually got rather than what you typed.
- 4Statement descriptor — the wording on your customer’s card statement. Covered in the next section.
The reference turns up wherever you need to join an appointment to money: under the customer’s name in the booking editor, on the customer’s confirmation screen, and stamped on every card payment — so it appears in the Appointment column of your transactions list, in the refund dialog and on any dispute, where it links straight back to the booking.
Changing your prefix later is safe. Older references keep their old look because nothing is rewritten, but Booked matches on the number in the middle, so links from a payment still open the right appointment. One caveat: the search box on the Bookings screen does not look at references, so searching BRAM-00042 there finds nothing — use the customer’s name instead.
Because payments are matched on the digits inside a reference, a prefix with five or more digits in a row — 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
Statement descriptor 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 descriptor right stops the case before it starts, which matters because the card network charges a fee for every dispute, win or lose.
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, and customers cannot cancel themselves. A cancellation is something you do: open the booking, set Status to Cancelled and save. That sends the Booking cancelled email and frees the slot immediately, so somebody else can take it — be sure before you do it. It does not refund anything; that is a separate step in the booking’s Payment section.
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.