What Booked is
The short version: what Booked does, who it is for, and what you can expect it to handle.
Booked is an appointment system that lives inside your own WordPress site. Customers pick what they want, choose a time you are genuinely free, pay or leave a deposit, and the appointment appears in your diary. This is what it handles, and what you still have to set up.
What Booked does, end to end
A customer opens the booking form on your website and picks a branch, a service and a time. Booked offers only times you can honour — the overlap of your opening hours with the working hours of a member of staff who performs that service there. They enter their details and pay, if you ask them to. The appointment lands in Bookings and on your Calendar, and an email goes out to the customer on its own.
The booking form as a customer sees it on your own website.
- 1The steps — Service, Time and Details always appear. Location shows only when you have more than one branch, and Team only when you have staff and have left the step switched on. A finished step turns into a tick a customer can click to go back.
- 2Search — always sits beside the heading, whether you sell four services or forty. It filters on the service name, so a customer can type “travel” instead of scrolling.
- 3A service — name, length and price all come from Business › Services. Change the price there and the form follows.
Money is part of the same flow. Where a service asks for payment the customer sees Secure your booking with either Amount due today or Deposit due today, and pays by card. On a device that offers Apple Pay or Google Pay, a wallet button appears above the card fields with or pay by card underneath it. Card details go straight to the card processor, never through your website — the form says as much: “Payments are secured by Booked. Your card details never touch this site.”
Who it is for, and what it replaces
Booked was built for pharmacies — travel clinics, flu jabs, ear microsuction — but nothing in it is pharmacy-specific. It suits any business selling a slot of someone’s time: clinics, dental and aesthetics practices, opticians, salons, therapists. If you have staff and a diary, it fits.
- A paper diary only one person can hold at a time.
- The phone — bookings now arrive while you are closed.
- A spreadsheet of who has paid, and payment links sent by hand.
- A third-party booking site that takes a cut and keeps your customer list.
That last one matters. Your bookings, customers and notes sit in your own site’s database, on your own hosting.
Where everything lives
| Place | What it holds |
|---|---|
| WordPress › Booked | One menu item in your sidebar. Every Booked screen opens inside it — there are no other WordPress screens to hunt through. |
| Your public page | Any page or post carrying the [get_booked] shortcode, which you copy from Customisation › Booking Form. |
| Your Booked account | Your subscription, licence key and plugin download. New versions come from there, not from the usual WordPress plugin updates. |
Booked remembers the last screen you were on, so the menu item may open Bookings rather than the Dashboard. Click Dashboard in the Booked sidebar to get back.
Deactivating Booked leaves every record untouched. Deleting the plugin destroys your bookings, customers, services, staff and locations — no confirmation, no export. Never delete it to reinstall cleanly.
Your side: the diary and the money
The Dashboard answers “how are we doing?” — what is booked today, what is coming, what you are owed and what has actually reached you.
Dashboard
Your business at a glance — bookings, revenue and activity.
| 09:15 | PS Priya Sharma | Travel health consultation |
| 10:00 | OB Oliver Ball | Ear microsuction |
| 11:30 | EC Emily Carter | Flu vaccination |
The Dashboard: approvals (1), the money (2), today (3) and what you have configured (4).
- 1Waiting for approval — on a new site Auto-approve new bookings is off, so everything arrives pending and this alert appears. Nothing is broken; the switch is under Settings › Booking rules.
- 2Expected versus taken — Expected this month is everything booked; Taken this month is what has actually been paid. The gap is what you collect on the day. Cancelled bookings count in neither, nor in any other figure here.
- 3Today’s schedule — the next appointments through the door, with Open calendar beside the heading. Click a row and Booked takes you to Bookings, where you can open that appointment.
- 4Your business — counts of your locations, employees, services and categories. The quickest way to spot a zero when your form shows no times.
What is ready on day one, and what is not
Seven customer emails are created and switched on the first time Booked runs — pending, approved, cancelled, rescheduled, changed, refunded and payment received — built from placeholders like {customer_first_name}. Every appointment gets a reference such as GB-00042, start times default to fifteen minutes apart, and the default form needs no configuration.
Two things people expect and do not find:
- Reminders. All seven emails react to something happening to a booking. The only scheduled message is the staff-facing Daily digest.
- Text messages. A text version of every one of the seven is written and waiting, but switched off, and nothing sends until you connect a text-message provider.
Nothing runs until your licence key is entered. An unlicensed site shows a single Activate Booked card in place of every screen, and the booking form renders nothing to visitors.
A key locks to the first domain that activates it, and a staging address counts as a different site. Activate a staging copy first and you will be told the licence is already in use elsewhere.
Setting it up, in order
What Booked cannot know is your business: branches, hours, services, prices, staff and who does what. The Dashboard tracks six setup jobs.
Answer a few questions and the assistant will build your locations, services and staff for you.
The setup card on the Dashboard, with four of the six jobs done.
- 1The progress bar — counts the six jobs below. It stops at 67%; see the note under this figure.
- 2Two ways through — Set up with the assistant asks four to seven plain questions, then offers to build your locations, services and staff in one go. I’ll do it myself hides the card.
- 3The last two jobs — messages and the booking form. The assistant never asks about either, nor about payments, deposits or branding, so these are yours by hand. Set up beside a job opens the screen that handles it.
Nothing ticks off the last two jobs, so 4 of 6 is the highest score and the card never hides itself. Clear it with I’ll do it myself once you are done — that hides it for every administrator, permanently. The same assistant and checklist stay at Settings › Company.
- Settings › Region & currency firstCountry, Timezone, Currency and Time format. Prices everywhere use that currency, the timezone decides which slots count as past, and the assistant stamps that country on every location it builds. Set all four before you build anything.
- Settings › CompanyCompany name, email and phone — these fill in your customer emails.
- Locations, then services, then staffA new location and a new staff member both start with no hours, and nothing warns you. Set them on the Times tab or no slots will appear.
- Settings › PaymentsTurn on Booked Payments for deposits or payment up front — no separate merchant account, no paperwork. Deposits under Settings › Booking rules stay locked until payments are verified. The checklist’s Set up link for this job lands on the Company tab, so click Payments in the rail yourself.
- Notifications, then the booking formSend yourself a test email, then paste the shortcode onto a page and take a test booking.
One rule underpins all of it: a time slot appears only when the service is offered at that location, the staff member works there and performs it, the location is open that day, and that person is working that day. Miss one link and the form shows no times without saying which.
Where to go next
The rest of this help centre follows that order: finding your way around, then locations, services and staff, then payments, then the booking form.