Sidekick, the assistant in your dashboard
Ask it for a number, or tell it to make the change. It shows its working and asks before it touches anything.
There is a bubble in the bottom-right corner of every Booked screen. Open it and you can ask a question about your own business — "how did last month go?", "who booked the most this year?" — or tell it to change something and watch it do it. It is not a search box over the manual. It can read your data and it can write to it.
Out of the box, every change stops and waits for you. Nothing is written to your services, staff or bookings until you have read what it wants to do and pressed Do it.
What it looks like
What it can look up
These never ask permission. They only read.
| Ask it | And it reads |
|---|---|
| “How did last month go?” | Bookings, revenue, repeat rate and your top services for any period. |
| “What do we charge for microsuction?” | Every service with its price, duration and status. |
| “Who works Tuesdays?” | Every team member with their working hours. |
| “What branches do we have?” | Every branch with its address. |
| “Has Sarah Wells been in before?” | A customer's booking history, total spend and no-shows. |
| “What's on tomorrow?” | Upcoming or recent bookings, newest first. |
What it can change
Every one of these stops and asks first, unless you have turned that off.
| Area | It can |
|---|---|
| Services | Create one, change its name, price, duration or description, and take it off the site by setting it inactive. |
| Team | Add someone, change their details, set their working hours a day at a time, set a recurring break, and book their holiday. |
| Branches | Add one, change its name, address, phone or email, and set its opening hours for chosen weekdays. |
| Who does what, where | Set which branches a person works at and which services they perform — and the same from the service's side. |
| Bookings | Move one to a new date and time, or cancel it. |
When Sidekick reschedules or cancels an appointment, the change is made in Booked and nothing is sent. That is deliberate — you almost always want to ring someone rather than have a template land in their inbox. Tell them yourself, or make the change from the booking screen where you can choose to notify.
Making it stop asking
The switch at the bottom of the panel — Make changes without asking — lets it work straight through. It is worth turning on for a batch of tedious changes ("give everyone a half-hour lunch at 1pm") and worth turning off again afterwards.
It is remembered in the browser you set it in, so turning it on at the front counter does not turn it on for the dispenser's laptop. It starts off.
It shows its working
Every step it takes appears in the thread as a line of its own, with a tick and how long it took. A step that failed shows a red mark and the reason. This is the point — when you ask for something with five parts, you can see which four went in and which one did not, instead of taking its word for it.
You can walk away
A long job carries on without you. Ask it to set up a member of staff with hours, breaks, branches and services, then go to another screen — the work finishes on the server and the answer is waiting when you come back. The conversation itself is kept too, so closing the panel loses nothing.
What it will not do
Sidekick only handles Booked and this business's use of it. Ask it something outside that — medical advice, a recipe, anything at all that is not your booking software — and it will say so and offer to help with something it can. That is a deliberate limit, not a gap: an assistant sitting in a pharmacy's dashboard has no business answering a clinical question.
It also cannot see anything you cannot. It works entirely within your own install, on your own data.
When it cannot help
If it is a fault, a billing question, or something it has no way to do, it will say so and offer to pass it to Booked support rather than guess. See Getting help from us.
What it costs
Asking Sidekick something costs 3 credits; having it make a change for you costs 5. Every plan includes 300 credits a month, which is around a hundred questions — and you can top up under Settings › AI credits if you want more.
A change costs more because it is two round trips rather than one: Sidekick works out what to do, you approve it, and it goes back to carry it out. Anything that fails is refunded. See Your monthly AI allowance.