Courses and repeat visits
One payment, several visits — vaccination courses and treatment plans.
Some appointments are not one appointment. A hepatitis B course is three doses spread over six months. A B12 programme is a visit every few weeks. Booked handles these as a course: the customer pays once, and every visit in the schedule is booked in the same sitting. You set it up on the service itself, under the Repeat visits tab.
Turn a service into a course
Open Business › Services, click the service, then choose Repeat visits from the tab rail on the left. Switch the toggle on and the rest of the card appears. Nothing is saved until you press Save service — moving between tabs does not save on its own.
Services
A three-dose hepatitis B course: doses at month 0, month 1 and month 6.
- 1Repeat visits — the third tab of the service editor. Price, duration, staff and branches stay where they always were.
- 2The course toggle — off by default. With it off, the service behaves as a single appointment.
- 3Number of visits — between 2 and 12. Leaving it at one switches the course back off when you save, with nothing on screen to tell you.
- 4How the follow-up dates are chosen — either the customer picks each date, or Booked places the visits for them. The next section compares the two.
- 5Booking window (days after the ideal date) — only appears for Client picks each date. It is how many days past the ideal date the customer may choose.
- 6Time between visits — one row per follow-up: a number, a unit of days, weeks or months, and the visit it counts from. Each gap runs from the visit before it, so they stack into the full schedule.
Change Number of visits from 4 down to 3 and the gap row for the visit you removed is discarded without warning. Raising it again adds fresh rows set to 1 week. Check the Time between visits rows every time you change the count.
Two ways to set the follow-up dates
The gap you enter produces an ideal date for each follow-up. What happens at that date depends on which choice card you picked.
| Client picks each date | Schedule automatically | |
|---|---|---|
| Customer sees | An extra Follow-ups step with a date and time picker per visit | Nothing extra — the visits are placed for them |
| Dates allowed | The ideal date, up to the Booking window in days after it | The same time of day on the ideal date, rolling forward day by day |
| Who they see | Any qualified member of staff who is free | The clinician from visit 1 where possible, otherwise anyone free |
| If nothing fits | They pick a different time, or a different first appointment | The whole booking is refused |
| Best for | Courses where the customer's diary matters more than the exact day | Short, tightly-spaced courses where you want it settled in one go |
Two things about the window catch people out. The gap is a minimum, not a margin either side: the window opens on the ideal date and runs forwards only, so a dose can never be brought earlier. And Booking window set to 0 means the ideal date and nothing else — far stricter than the card's wording ("within a few days of the ideal date") suggests. Three to seven days usually keeps a course bookable.
Booked plans and checks every follow-up before it writes anything, so a course can never half-book. But if one visit cannot be placed within 90 days of its ideal date, the customer is turned away with "We couldn't automatically schedule all of the visits. Please contact us." and gets no appointment at all. The search will also fall back to any free slot on the day, so someone who booked 9am can end up with a 4pm follow-up.
What the customer books and pays
In Client picks each date mode the customer gets one extra step, Follow-ups, after they have chosen the first appointment.
The Follow-ups step, with visit 1 already fixed and each follow-up held to its own window.
- 1Follow-ups — an extra step in the customer's progress rail. It sits after date and time, because every window is measured from the first appointment.
- 2The course banner — tells the customer up front how many appointments they are committing to.
- 3Visit 1 — marked Selected and not editable here. Changing it means going back a step, which re-dates every window below.
- 4Each follow-up window — shown as "On or after 12 Nov (up to 15 Nov)", never earlier than the ideal date and never starting in the past. If a time goes between choosing it and paying, the customer sees "One of your follow-up times was just taken. Please pick another."
On the money side, a course is one sale. Visit 1 carries the whole price and every follow-up is saved at £0.00. Any deposit rule set on the service or its category is worked out from that price and taken on visit 1 in the usual way through Booked Payments. The confirmation screen lists "Your 3 visits" with each date and time.
The customer sees all their visits on the confirmation screen, but the confirmation email names the first appointment only — the follow-ups are created quietly. If the dates matter, put the full schedule into your confirmation wording, or hand over a card at the first visit.
How the visits appear in Bookings
A course is not one row. Each visit is a full booking of its own, with its own date, staff member and status, tagged so you can see it is part of a set.
Every appointment — click one to view or edit it.
| When | Customer | Service | Employee | Status | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2027-04-14 09:20 | Oliver Ball | Hepatitis B course Visit 3/3 | Priya Sharma | Confirmed | £0.00 |
| 2026-11-13 09:40 | Oliver Ball | Hepatitis B course Visit 2/3 | James Whitfield | Confirmed | £0.00 |
| 2026-10-12 09:20 | Oliver Ball | Hepatitis B course Visit 1/3 | Priya Sharma | Confirmed | £120.00 |
One course, three rows. The list is sorted by appointment date, so the last visit sits at the top.
- 1The visit tag — "Visit 1/3", "Visit 2/3" and so on in the Service column, with the tooltip "Part of a course of visits". Same-visit bundled add-ons borrow this tag, so an add-on can read "Visit 2/3" without being a course at all.
- 2£0.00 on the follow-ups — correct, not a fault. All the money sits on visit 1, which is the only row with a Payment section and the only place to refund the course. Analytics counts the whole course as revenue on visit 1's date.
Because the visits are separate bookings, they can land with different staff. In Client picks each date mode the follow-up times are searched across everyone qualified, not the clinician who took visit 1 — worth checking if continuity matters to you.
Rescheduling or cancelling one visit
Move or cancel a single visit exactly as you would any other appointment. The rest of the course is untouched — there is no cascade, and no link back to the sibling visits from inside the editor.
- Open the visit from BookingsSearching the customer's name brings the whole course together; the visit tag tells you which row is which.
- Change the date and time under AppointmentEdit Date * and Start time *, then Save booking. The customer is sent the "Booking rescheduled" email for that appointment only.
- To cancel one visit, set its Status to CancelledStatus lives in the Service section. Saving sends "Booking cancelled" and frees the slot straight away, so it may be gone if you change your mind.
- Sort out the money on visit 1Cancelling never refunds anything. If the customer is dropping the course, open visit 1 and use Refund payment there — the follow-ups have nothing to refund.
Deleting a visit with the bin icon is instant, sends the customer nothing and cannot be undone. Cancelling is almost always the better move: it tells the customer, frees the time and keeps the history.
Limits worth knowing before you switch it on
- Courses and group bookings do not combine. A course booking is always forced to one person. If group bookings happen to be on for that service the customer is still shown the "How many people?" step and can choose 3 — the choice is then ignored.
- Courses and same-visit bundles do not combine either. Any add-on chosen on a course service is dropped when the booking is written.
- Courses only come from the booking form. A booking you add by hand in Bookings or the Calendar is one plain appointment — you cannot build a course, or add a missing visit to one, from the admin.
- Every visit shares the first one's status. With auto-approve off, all three arrive Pending and each needs confirming.
- The usual availability rules still apply. A seasonal window or a day-of-week restriction on the Availability tab can quietly make later visits impossible to place.