Messages timed from a date they gave you
Twenty-four weeks after a positive test. Three weeks before they fly.
Most follow-ups are timed from your diary. This one is timed from something the customer told you — a date on their record, and a number of days, weeks or months either side of it.
An ultrasound clinic asks when somebody tested positive, and writes to them at twenty-four weeks about a gender scan. A travel pharmacy asks when they fly, and writes three weeks before that date about the jabs that need lead time. A salon asks the wedding date and counts backwards to the trial. It is the same machine.
Setting one up, start to finish
Three steps, in this order. The first two are on the service; the third is on the follow-up.
1. Ask the question
Services › open the service › Questions. Switch on Ask questions for this service, add a question, and set its Type to Date. Only date questions can drive a timeline — an offset from "how old are you" would never fire.
2. Choose where it is asked
Same screen. The Where in the booking? spine draws your booking journey top to bottom, and you click the point the questions should appear. See Ask your own questions.
3. Build the follow-up
Follow-ups › New follow-up, and set What starts it? to A date they gave you comes round.
What starts the follow-up, and for whom.
What starts it?A timeline follow-up: twenty-four weeks after the date they gave you.
- 1The answer — every date question on every service appears here. If the list is empty, no service asks a date question yet.
- 2How far, and which way — a number, a unit, and after or before that date.
- 3This is private — switch this on for anything they may not have told the people around them. See below.
Writing the message
Three merge fields come from the answer itself, and they are worked out at the moment the message goes out, never when it was scheduled:
{answer:id} | What they told you, as they gave it. |
{weeks_since:id} {days_since:id} | How long since that date. For counting up. |
{weeks_until:id} {days_until:id} | How long until it. For counting down to a departure or a wedding. |
The id is the code Booked gives the question when it is created. The service editor does not show it, and these fields are not in the + Add a detail menu (typed in, they stay as codes rather than turning into tags), so ask Booked support for a question’s id if you want to use them. The ordinary booking merge tags, such as {customer_first_name}, work as usual.
Two more things decide who gets one. The customer needs an email address on their record. And each timeline follow-up reaches a person once, ever: if they later give you a new date for the same question, the newest answer is the one that counts, but a follow-up they have already been through will not start again.
Keeping it private
A text that opens "congratulations on your pregnancy" is a disclosure to whoever is holding the phone. Switch This is private on and Booked enforces two rules:
- No answer may appear in an email subject line.
- No answer may appear in the first 40 characters of a text — roughly what a locked phone shows.
The same value further down the message is completely fine; that is the point. If you write a subject that breaks the rule, saving is refused with an explanation naming the merge field — because by the time it sends, it is already somebody's bad day. The check only looks for the answer merge fields: it cannot tell that your own wording, or a service name such as "Early pregnancy scan", gives something away, so keep subjects and the start of texts neutral.
Health answers are special
Before you switch a timeline on, mark the questions as health data and write the consent wording — see Asking health questions lawfully. A timeline sends from an answer, so the permission to hold that answer is what makes the whole sequence lawful. Withdrawing it stops any timeline already running for them.
Cycle dates, pregnancy status, diagnoses and treatments are special category health data under UK GDPR. If you collect them, you need explicit consent for that specific purpose, recorded separately from your ordinary booking terms — the consent box on the questions screen is where to word it. Keep the answers only as long as they are useful to the person, and remember that a request to be forgotten covers them.