Services and bookings

Before you start, open these. They are both under Website in the menu: Services and Bookings.

Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.

If your business sells time or know-how rather than objects, service items are how you describe that on your website. And, when you want it, how customers book it.

Describing a service

A service has a name, a tagline and a summary, plus photos.

It sits in a category and a subcategory, which is what lets visitors click through instead of scrolling. Rank sets the order they appear in. Locations says where you offer it, which links back to the business locations from Essentials.

Hourly rates are optional. Switch on hourly rates and give a rate, or leave it off and talk about price privately.

Both are fine. A service with no price on it is not an unfinished record.

Turning on bookings

Mark a service bookable and give it opening hours, and the public page grows a booking form.

Opening hours are set per service, not per business. A consultation you only do on Tuesday mornings is not governed by the fact your office is open all week.

Location capacities say how many bookings a place can take at the same time. Two chairs means two appointments at once, not one.

A booking contact is who gets told when a booking comes in.

   service_item                 booking
   -----------------            -----------------
   what you offer               one customer, one slot
   bookable + opening hours     date, time, name, phone
   location capacities          status

A booking is a record like any other

A booking arrives with the customer’s name, phone, email, the date and time, any notes, and a status.

It goes into a list you work through. It has an audit trail like everything else, so “who confirmed this, and when” is a question you can answer.

It also means bookings follow the same approval rules as everything else. If your saves go to Pending elsewhere, expect the same here.

The mistake: opening hours nobody meant

Publish a bookable service with generous opening hours and no limit on numbers, and one person ends up with four appointments at nine o’clock on Monday morning.

The form will do exactly what you told it, quite happily.

So set the hours to the hours you will really keep. Then set the capacity to the number of people you can genuinely serve at once.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, make a service bookable and give it narrow opening hours. Take a booking from the public side as if you were a customer. Then go and find that booking in the app.

Seeing both halves is what makes the settings make sense.