Create your first service

What customers can actually book — name, length, price and who delivers it.

A service is one thing a customer can book — a travel health consultation, a flu jab, ear syringing. It carries the name they read, how long the appointment runs, what it costs, and which of your staff deliver it at which branch.

Open the service editor

Go to Booked › Business › Services. Until you add one, the list reads "No services yet. Add the appointments customers can book." Click Add service and a full-page editor opens, headed "New service", with the General tab active.

Six tabs run down the left. General holds the name, length, price and status; Availability limits the service to certain weekdays or a time of year; Repeat visits turns it into a course covered by one payment; Staff and Locations say who delivers it and where; Eligibility adds screening questions. All six are one form — switching tabs saves nothing, and Save service writes the lot at once. A new service starts at 30 minutes, no buffers, a blank price and Active.

The General tab, field by field

• 1Name * — the only field Booked insists on; save with it empty and you get "A service name is required." Customers read it as the card heading, so avoid internal codes.
• 2Category — optional grouping. The dropdown starts on Uncategorised, and every category you create at Business › Categories joins the list.
• 3Duration (minutes) * — how long one appointment runs. New services start at 30.
• 4Price — what one person pays. The symbol beside it comes from Settings › Region & currency › Currency.
• 5Buffer after (min) — clear time the slot has to have on top of the duration, for clean-down or notes. Its twin, Buffer before (min), is saved but never used.
• 6Status — only Active services are offered to customers.
• 7Short description — one line, in small grey type under the name on the customer's card. It is the only description you can edit.

Duration and buffers

Duration sets how long the appointment runs in your calendar. To offer a time, Booked needs a bigger block than that — duration + buffer after — and the whole block has to fit inside one continuous stretch of open hours, so nothing can straddle a lunchtime close or run past closing.

The buffer is not written into the appointment's finish time, so it protects the run-up to a booking rather than the tail of one — someone can still take the minute an existing appointment ends. Nor does it move where starts fall: those step from opening time in interval-sized jumps, so a branch opening at 09:10 on a 15-minute interval offers 09:10, 09:25, 09:40. If your duration is not a multiple of the interval, unusable gaps open between appointments, so it pays to match the two.

Price and deposits

Price is what one person pays for one appointment. It shows on the service card, in the running summary, on the confirmation screen and in the confirmation email. A blank price saves as 0.00, and the card then shows £0.00 to customers, so fill it in even if you take the money in store.

Deposit decides how much of that price is taken online when someone books. A new service reads Use category default, so it inherits from its category, which inherits from Settings › Booking rules › Deposits. Override it here with No deposit, Percentage of price, Fixed amount or Full amount (100%); while it is inheriting, the hint under the dropdown says what it would otherwise pick up. "Full amount (100%)" is not really a deposit — it charges the whole price up front and reads to the customer as "Pay in full". Whatever you pick, the amount taken is capped at the price.

Who delivers it, and where

Two tabs, one idea: a service can only be booked with someone qualified to do it, at a branch that offers it. Both are chip lists — click a name to include it, click again to remove it. The exception is a service marked as a video consultation, which ignores the Locations tab entirely.

• 1Save service — replaces this service's whole staff list and whole locations list, so if two of you edit from different screens, whoever saves last wins.
• 2Staff and Locations — Staff holds the card "Delivered by", Locations holds "Available at". Before you have any, they read "No employees yet — add staff first." and "No locations yet — add one first."
• 3The chips — highlighted means selected. The same links open from the other side, at Employees › a person › Services ("Can perform") and Locations › a branch › Services ("Services offered here").

Before a service appears on your booking form

This is where most first services get stuck. A service reaches customers only when all three are true:

• Its Status is Active.
• At least one branch is ticked on the Locations tab.
• At least one Active employee is ticked on the Staff tab and works at that same branch (Employees › a person › Locations, "Works at").

What the customer sees

• 1Name — exactly what you typed, beside a colour swatch. There is no colour picker for a service, so every swatch takes the accent colour of that booking form.
• 2Short description — your one line, in small grey type.
• 3Duration — shown as "45 min", or as "1h 30m" and "2h" once it passes an hour.
• 4Price — the price for one person, in your chosen currency.

The arrangement is set at Customisation › Booking Form › Layout › Service picking: "Category then service" asks "What are you booking?" first, with a card per category, while "Single list" shows one list with each category's name as a heading. That first step only appears when there are at least two groups to choose between, and the search box filters on the service name alone.

Services appear in the order you created them and cannot be reordered. In category mode, a service with no category — or one whose category is Inactive or deleted — is gathered into a card called Other; in a single list it sits at the bottom, under no heading. Making a category Inactive hides the category, not its services: they stay bookable.

Hiding a service, and why not to delete one

Click any row in the Services list to reopen the editor. The Search services… box matches the service name and its category name, nothing else. The Status column prints the stored value in lower case — "active" or "inactive" — while the editor shows the tidier Active / Inactive dropdown. They are the same thing.

To stop taking bookings for something — a seasonal clinic, a service under review — set its Status to Inactive. It stops being offered on the booking form — anyone still holding an old page open is refused when they try to book it — and every past booking keeps its name.