How to digitise the bookings in your business in 5 steps

You do not move to an online booking diary because you fancy a new app. You move because the phone will not stop ringing, exactly when you are busiest. Or because you have booked two people into the same slot, and now you have to ring one of them to say they can no longer come.

The good news is that it is an easy move: five simple steps, a single afternoon. And you do not have to do all five at once - each step on its own makes the next day easier.

You will see examples from different trades: a psychology practice in the first step, a dental one in the second, a salon in the third. The logic stays the same everywhere. Only the vocabulary changes.

What “digitised” actually means

An online booking diary is not the paper diary moved onto a screen. If you are still the one writing in every appointment, all you have swapped is paper for a screen.

Three things make the difference:

• the client books alone, without ringing you and without waiting for an answer
• the app refuses overlaps, because it knows who is working and what is already taken
• the messages go out without you: the confirmation straight away, then the reminders 24 hours and an hour before

Everything else - the reports, the packages, the reviews - comes later and is optional. Start with the five steps below.

Step 1. Write down your services, with their real duration

The first screen is Services. Each service needs three things: a name, a duration and a price.

Start with the five to ten services you sell in an ordinary week, not with everything you have ever done. You can add the rest in two minutes when you need them; a long list at the start only means a client who scrolls and closes the page.

Duration is where people slip most often. Enter the real one, including the preparation and the clearing up afterwards. In a psychology practice an individual session runs 50 minutes and a couples session 80; put both down as an hour and the calendar starts promising times that do not exist.

Step 2. Tell the app when you work

The second screen is Schedule. This is where the Sunday evening phone calls stop.

Enter the intervals you work, day by day. A dental practice open from 9:00 to 18:00, with a break from 13:00 to 14:00, enters exactly that: with the break written into the schedule, nobody can book your lunch and there is nobody left to turn down.

The days off and the exceptions go here too: a holiday, a morning taken by a course, the bank holidays. Every exception you enter now is a cancellation call you will not have to make three weeks from now.

Step 3. Add the people and the resources

If you work alone, skip this step. From the moment there are two of you, the Team screen is what keeps order: each person has their own schedule and their own services, and the client picks who they come to.

In a salon this shows straight away: if one stylist offers a service and another does not, the calendar stops offering it in that person’s slots. If you run a salon, the page for salons goes into more detail.

Separate from people are the resources, in the tab next to the services: a massage room, a wash chair, a lift, a machine. An auto shop with three mechanics and two lifts cannot take three cars at once, and the resource entered into the app is the only thing that stops the third booking.

Step 4. Take the link and put it where people look for you

So far you have built something only you can see. The step that changes tomorrow is Booking page: that is where you take your business’s own link from.

The link needs no website. The places that bring the most bookings, in order:

1. in the Instagram bio, as the first link
2. on the action button of the Facebook page
3. in the automatic reply on WhatsApp Business
4. on the Google Business Profile, under bookings
5. on your site, if you have one, as a button rather than as text

The client opens it in a browser, picks the service, the staff member and the time, leaves a name and a phone number, and that is it. No account, no app to install. The fewer steps between your link and the booking, the more people make it all the way through.

If you only do one of the five steps, do this one. Most bookings arrive in the evening and at the weekend, exactly when you cannot pick up the phone. What else the app can do, beyond this, is on the client booking page.

Step 5. Switch on the automatic emails

The last screen is Emails. It is also the one that pays for itself.

The emails go out without you pressing anything: the confirmation right after the booking, a reminder 24 hours before, another an hour before, plus the cancellation and reschedule messages. You see them all in one list, you change the wording, and you switch off whatever you do not need.

A fitness studio that sends the 24 hour reminder finds out quickly what it is worth: places freed up in good time get taken again, places freed up in the last hour do not. The reminder does not talk anyone into coming, but it gives the person who can no longer make it a chance to say so while it still helps.

The first week: what changes and what does not

The clients who used to ring will still ring. Some of them will never book online, and that is fine: you enter the booking yourself while you talk to them. It lands in the same calendar, and the client record is created on its own.

Do not throw the paper diary away in the first week. Move only the next seven days into the app. The rest gets added as it comes closer, and after a week the diary stays shut without you making any decision about it.

The client list builds itself. You have nobody to type in by hand. After a few weeks you already have records for everyone who comes back, with what they had done and when they were last in.

How you know it worked

Three numbers, a month later:

• how many bookings arrived outside your working hours - in the evening, early in the morning, on a Sunday. Those are clients you would have lost before, or rung back the next day
• how many no-shows you had compared with the month before (if there are still too many, 7 ways to reduce no-shows)
• how often the phone rang for someone to ask whether you have anything free on Thursday

The other half, the one the client sees, is on the online booking page. And if you are still choosing between several apps, the guide to choosing one compares the four kinds on the market and what each really costs.