Dates, times, currency and language

Make Booked speak the way your customers expect.

Four small choices decide how Booked reads to the people who book with you: where you trade, what clock you keep, what money you take, and how times are written. They live on one tab. This article covers what each one does, what it quietly does not do, and where the rest of the wording your customers see actually comes from.

What the Localisation tab controls

Go to Booked in the WordPress menu, then Settings at the bottom of Booked's own sidebar. Settings opens as a rail of tabs down the left; Region & currency is the second one. It is a single card with four fields.

• 1Region & currency — second in the tab rail, between Company and Bookings.
• 2Country — type to search, placeholder Select country. This is where your business is legally based. It is used as the merchant country when your Booked Payments account is created, and by the checkout and tax logic — so pick where you trade from, not where your customers live.
• 3Timezone — type to search, placeholder Select timezone. Every zone is listed with its offset right now, so Europe/London reads (UTC+01:00) through the summer and (UTC+00:00) in winter. Underscores become spaces, so look for America/New York, not America/New_York.
• 4Currency — the currency for every price, deposit and payment.
• 5Time format — 24-hour (14:30) or 12-hour (2:30 PM).
• 6Save settings — in the header and again in a sticky bar at the foot of the page. A green Saved appears next to it when it lands.

One thing to know before you start clicking about: Save settings saves the whole Settings screen, not just the tab you are looking at. If you change the currency here, wander over to Bookings and change the deposit, then press Save once, both are stored. The reverse is also true — leave Settings without saving and you lose everything you touched on every tab, not only this one.

Time zone, and the clock that actually runs your diary

The Timezone field records the time zone your business keeps. It is reference information: your appointments, your availability and your reminder emails all run on WordPress's own time zone, set on the Settings › General screen in WordPress itself.

Get that one right and the rest follows. A 9:15 appointment is stored as 9:15 in your site's time zone, the reminder is timed against that, and the event written into your Google or Outlook calendar carries the same zone. Daylight saving is handled for you: you set Europe/London once, not GMT in winter and BST in summer. Fixed-offset choices like UTC are the one exception — they never shift, so a UTC site drifts an hour out of step with British clocks every spring.

Dates, times and the start of the week

Time format is the only clock setting, and it changes the customer's view: the slot buttons on your booking form, the summary panel and the confirmation screen all switch between 09:15 and 9:15 am. Inside the admin your team keeps working on a 24-hour clock.

There is no separate date-format field. Dates on the booking form are written out in full — Monday, 3 August 2026 — with the day before the month, and the week always begins on Monday.

• 1The week starts on Monday — in the customer's date picker, in your Calendar screen, and in every opening-hours and staff-hours grid in Booked. It is fixed, so there is nothing to set and nothing that can drift out of line.
• 2The date, written in full — weekday, day, month, year. Booked writes dates this way to customers rather than in figures, so there is no 03/08 versus 08/03 confusion for anyone reading it.
• 3Slot times follow Time format — 9:15 am here. Switch to 24-hour (14:30) and the same slots read 09:15 and 14:30. Struck-through slots are already taken.
• 4Prices use your currency symbol — always with two decimal places, symbol first.

Currency and how prices are shown

Twelve currencies are available: British Pound (GBP), US Dollar (USD), Euro (EUR), Australian Dollar (AUD), Canadian Dollar (CAD), New Zealand Dollar (NZD), Swiss Franc (CHF), Swedish Krona (SEK), South African Rand (ZAR), Indian Rupee (INR), Japanese Yen (JPY) and UAE Dirham (AED). Pounds is the default.

Press Save settings and the change is immediate — every price across the admin, the booking form and your service list is relabelled without a page refresh. The currency symbol also follows into the deposit field on Settings › Booking rules, where Deposit amount (£) takes on whichever symbol you chose.

Amounts are always printed with two decimal places and the symbol in front, so a yen price shows as ¥4500.00 rather than the local convention. Currency is a single site-wide setting — Booked cannot price one branch in pounds and another in euros, so a business trading in two currencies needs two sites.

The words your customers read

Localisation sets the numbers. The actual sentences come from three separate places, and knowing which is which saves a lot of hunting.

1. Your own contentService names, category names, branch names and staff names are printed exactly as you typed them. Write them in the language your customers read and they need no translating at all — this is most of what a customer sees on the booking form.
2. Your messagesEvery email and text is a template you can rewrite under Customisation › Notifications. Subject lines and body text are yours to word however you like, in any language, for every stage of the booking.
3. Booked's own built-in labelsThe handful of words Booked supplies itself — step names, buttons, the small print on the form. These follow your WordPress Site Language where a translation is available, and are supplied in English.

• 1The appointment date and time — these are filled in from the booking itself, as stored: the date in year-month-day figures and the time on a 24-hour clock. Send yourself a test booking and read the real email before you go live, so there are no surprises.
• 2The price — carries your Localisation currency symbol, so it matches what the customer saw at checkout.
• 3Your business details — {company_name} and {company_phone} come from Settings › Company. Everything else in this email is text you wrote under Notifications.

What is set somewhere else

Several things people expect to find on Localisation are not there. Here is where each one actually lives.