Customers and their records

Everyone who books with you, what they have spent, and what you know about them.

Everyone who books with you gets a customer record: contact details, private notes, and any files you attach. It is deliberately small — appointments live on Bookings, money on Analytics.

The customer list and search

Go to Booked › Customers. Everyone with a record gets one row; click it, or the pencil, to open them.

• 1Add customer — opens a blank New customer record. Anyone booking online is added for you.
• 2Search name, email or phone… — filters as you type across all three fields at once. No match leaves an empty table and no message — a nil result, not a fault.
• 3Bookings — a count of every appointment for that person, including cancelled, declined and no-shows: three bookings all cancelled still reads 3.
• 4Status — lower case here, Active / Inactive in the editor. Nothing reads it: inactive neither hides anyone nor stops them booking.

Rows sort by first name, not surname, and no column is sortable. The whole list downloads at once, so with thousands of customers it is slow.

Inside a customer record

A record is one full-page screen with up to four cards.

• 1Back to customers — returns to the list; anything typed is discarded.
• 2First name — the asterisk misleads. The save is only refused when both names are empty, so a surname-only record is fine.
• 3Status — a private marker. Nothing in Booked acts on it.
• 4Notes — staff-only, newest first, never sent to the customer.
• 5Documents — files pinned to the person. Read the warning below first.
• 6Activity log — who changed the record and when. Hidden until it exists, and it names edits by number ("Customer #48 updated"), not by person.

Save customer returns you to the list rather than leaving the record open. On a new record, Notes and Documents read "Save the customer first, then you can add notes and documents." and the Activity log is hidden — so save, then reopen the person to add your note. Email is optional, unchecked for duplicates, and a malformed address is discarded rather than refused: "jane@" saves as an empty field.

Notes and documents

Notes are internal, never sent to the customer, and cannot be edited — only added and deleted, with no undo. Notes typed against a booking are a separate store and never reach the person's record, so keep allergies and standing instructions on the customer. Upload document attaches a file, subject to WordPress's allowed file types and size limit; deleting one deletes the file itself.

Records that create themselves — and details that go stale

When someone books online, Booked matches them to an existing record by email address only — exact, ignoring capitals; where several share an address, the oldest wins. Empty fields are filled in from the new booking, but fields that already hold something are never overwritten, so a regular who books with a new mobile keeps the old number. The form asks for an email but not a phone, so these records can have no number.

Spend, repeat rate and lifetime value

None of this is on the record: there is no spend figure, no revenue and no booking history there. Customer value lives on Booked › Analytics, mostly as business-wide averages.

• 1Date range — governs Bookings and Customers only; "returning" means people who had booked before the range started.
• 2Repeat rate — the share of customers with two or more bookings of any status. All-time: it ignores the date range, so changing the range will not move it.
• 3Lifetime value — also all-time, and booked value rather than cash: the price of live bookings divided by everyone who has ever booked. Live means not cancelled or declined.
• 4Most valuable customers — top six by revenue, all-time, named from the copy on each booking, so a blank name shows "—".

Duplicates, and tidying them up

Nothing prevents duplicates: no uniqueness rule on email, no warning, no merge tool. Book once as jane@home.com and once as jane@work.com and you get two permanent records, each with its own history, notes and documents. Tidying up is manual, in this order.

1. Pick the record to keepUsually the one with the address they actually use.
2. Reassign the bookingsOpen each appointment on the duplicate, choose the keeper in the Customer picker and save. This fires the "changed" notification.
3. Move notes and documents by handRetype and re-upload. Nothing transfers.
4. Delete the leftoverOnly once no booking points at it.

You cannot create a customer from inside the booking editor: leave the booking, add them under Customers, and come back.

Stopping someone booking

Status will not do it. Use Settings › Booking rules › Blocked from booking to block an email address, a domain, an IP address or an IP range, with an optional internal reason. Leave Type on Auto-detect.

• It applies to the public booking form only: staff can still book that person in the admin, and existing appointments stand.
• Email and domain blocking are reliable. IP blocking uses the address your server sees, which behind a CDN or proxy may be the proxy — missing your target, or blocking everyone behind it.
• Adding an entry that already exists does nothing — no error, no duplicate, no confirmation — and Remove deletes a row instantly, also without confirmation.
• Blocked visitors get a vague message and are never told they are blocked, so expect a phone call. Attempts are logged under Settings › Activity log.

Permissions and getting data out

Customers needs the booking-management permission, and the Booked menu only appears for users who can manage locations — so staff on the built-in Employee role see neither. The blocklist needs the higher settings permission.

There is no CSV export, no per-person download, and no link to WordPress's Export or Erase Personal Data tools — so a subject-access or erasure request is manual: the record, their bookings, notes, documents, screening answers and the activity trail.