Appointments and booking
Availability looks like a calendar and behaves like an inventory problem, with one of everything and no acceptable way to sell it twice.
Availability is never as simple as a grid of free slots. A real appointment needs a person who is qualified for that service, a room or chair, sometimes a piece of equipment, and a gap long enough for the service plus whatever cleanup follows it. It has to respect opening hours, holidays, the practitioner's own calendar, and a rule that says this treatment cannot start after five. Every one of those is an intersection, and computing them correctly under concurrent booking attempts is the whole engineering problem hiding behind a friendly calendar.
No-shows are usually the largest controllable cost in the business, and software genuinely moves them. A deposit at booking changes behaviour more than any reminder does. Reminders still matter, and their timing matters more than their wording — far enough ahead that cancelling is still useful to you, close enough that it has not been forgotten. And rescheduling has to be easier than not turning up, because if cancelling requires a phone call during business hours, people will simply not come.
The staff side decides whether any of it is used. People who run a diary all day will abandon a system that is slower than the paper book it replaced, and they judge it on the awkward cases: the walk-in, the client who wants the same slot every fortnight, the appointment that overran, the practitioner who called in sick and whose day now has to move. Those are not edge cases in this business. They are Tuesday.
How we work
- Availability is computed as the intersection of person, resource and rules, and a slot is held atomically — two people tapping at once cannot both get it.
- Deposits and reminders are treated as the levers they are, and their effect is measured rather than assumed.
- Rescheduling is made easier than not attending, in one tap and without contacting anyone.
A booking screen. Choosing a date rebuilds the available times.
What this includes
Pick what you need and send it over.
Questions
- Can it sync with Google or Outlook calendars?
- Yes, and it usually should for staff, so a personal commitment blocks a bookable slot without anyone re-entering it. Treat the external calendar as a source of busy time rather than as the source of truth for bookings — two systems both believing they own the appointment is how a double booking happens.