After breaking Google calendar, thousands of missed emails, no shows, and cancelled appointments, we wanted to take bookings into our own hands. That’s why we built BooksOpen, the first booking software made for you.
We’ve simplified everything, from coordinating calendars, rescheduling, email notifications, and whatever cancellation policy you want to customize, it’s all wrapped together beautifully under the hood.
Get to know BooksOpen:
- Appointment scheduling
- Personalized calendar availability
- Custom booking rules and policies
- Questions and forms
- Notifications
- Payments and deposits
- Your App Dashboard and more
Scheduling App: Automated Bookings From Your Booking Page
Give your clients the easiest way to book you. Send customers your link, they’ll find a time that works for them, we’ll collect all the necessary forms and payment information in just a few clicks. Just like that you have a new appointment in your calendar.
Once you set up your services and booking settings to accept bookings, your link is ready to share. Your live link is how your clients will be able to find and book time in your calendar. In a few clicks your clients will be able to book you without any back-and-forths, giving both of you time back into your day. For your clients all the need to do is:
- Select the service they’re looking for.
- Use the calendar to find an available time that works for them.
- Input their email address so you can reach out to them if needed.
- Fill out any forms and other information you’ll need from your clients.
- If there’s a cancellation policy, clients can put their credit card details on file. You can always choose how you want to implement this.
- Booked! You’ll both receive an email confirming the appointment, and you’ll see it in your dashboard and calendar.
Seems simple right? That’s because it really is. But don’t let that simplicity fool you, because under the hood is where all the magic happens. With BooksOpen you’ll be able to customize that entire booking experience with your custom policies around forms, payments, and cancellations all within your settings page.
To help you save time, we’ve helped you out with some defaults, so your booking link is available right away. You can always turn it offline and customize any of those defaults.
What is an Online Booking System?
Definition and benefits of an online booking system
An online booking system is a software solution designed to help businesses manage appointments, bookings, and schedules efficiently. By allowing clients to book services or appointments online, it eliminates the need for phone calls, emails, or in-person visits. This not only streamlines the booking process but also enhances productivity and reduces no-shows. With an online booking system, businesses can manage appointments more effectively, leading to improved customer satisfaction and a smoother operational flow.
How it simplifies scheduling and maximizes productivity
An online booking system simplifies scheduling by automating the entire booking process. It sends reminders and notifications to both clients and staff, ensuring everyone is on the same page. This comprehensive approach reduces administrative tasks, freeing up your time. By streamlining the scheduling process, you can focus on your studio, craft, and service.
Importance of having a user-friendly booking page
A user-friendly booking page is crucial for any online booking system. It should be easy to navigate, mobile-friendly, and provide clear instructions for clients to book appointments. A well-designed booking page can significantly increase conversion rates and reduce bounce rates, leading to a better overall customer experience. When clients find it easy to book appointments, they are more likely to return, ensuring a steady flow of business and satisfied customers.
The Scheduling Software Built For You
Managing your studio and your time, including appointment scheduling, is how you stay sane. Whether you’re a morning person and want to start your day bright and early or you want to drop off your kids before getting into the studio, we know how important being in control of your schedule is. So we made sure your availability can fit to whatever schedule you are on.
This is how you make your calendar yours
Set your weekly availability, any way you need it. Basic scheduling is a foundational feature, allowing you to manage appointments efficiently while providing additional features at tiered pricing for more advanced functionality.
- Add breaks, holidays, and closed periods,
- Decide whether you want to book into your after hours or not,
- Determine what minimum notice you need before confirming an appointment,
- Let clients book immediately after or round to the nearest half hour.
And that’s just how you want your availability to show up. You can update and change any of these preferences for all future appointments. You no longer need to manually block your calendar when you’re off, or scramble because you have a last minute booking. And you can even change your timezone, if you’re guest spotting while globetrotting.
No studio is the same, everyone has the routine that works for them and we wanted to make sure BooksOpen can match that same energy, and give you full control over your calendar.
Create and manage your services exactly how you want them
Your time and your services are your bread and butter. It’s why clients come to you, how you make a living, and sets you apart from the rest. This is our bread and butter as well. With services you get all the basics:
- Create your service name and categorize them how you see fit
- Provide custom aftercare instructions
- Price and fee information along
- Duration
Those are the must-haves, but we know that not all services are created equal. Not only can you create and define your services you can limit how often they are bookable, and automatically add some buffer time that’s just for you. Whether you’re cleaning up, doing documentation, or just need to catch your breath buffer times can help keep your day under control.
Now here’s some special BooksOpen magic. For every service you create, you can send clients automatic follow up reminders. Say you want a customer to come back in 4 weeks, an email and booking link will automatically be sent to customers 4 weeks after their appointment date. Having clients come back is a huge opportunity to give them the follow up care they need, but also an opportunity for them to buy more things from your studio.
Customize your policies that work for you and your clients
To have a cancellation policy or not to have a cancellation policy? To be honest, there’s no right answer. But whatever works for your business, BooksOpen will implement it for you. If you want to open up your calendar, and let people freely book your time, that totally works. If you want to capture an upfront deposit before booking people in, BooksOpen will safely and securely grab their payment information and deposit. Or if you simply just want to have their card on file in case they don’t show up, we can do that too. That’s all to say, that whatever booking policy you want to implement we got your back.
That’s not the only thing you can personalize with your account. BooksOpen will let you choose between freely opening up your calendar for people to book, or you can change your booking mode to Manual and receive booking requests for you to approve or decline.
With each preference you can also set up exactly how you want it implemented. You can set minimum cancellation or rescheduling periods up to the minute, hour or day.
Your booking policies will be made clear to clients during the booking process. If there’s crucial details you want to highlight before a client comes in, you can add detailed notes that appear on your profile right in the Booking Settings.
Gather all the right information before a client makes a booking
While it’s amazing to see these appointments start coming in, there is no worse feeling than when clients show up, didn’t read the emails and aren’t eligible for their appointment. Too often have clients come in and for a very preventable reason, we aren’t able to service them. This not only wastes your time, but your clients aren’t happy, you aren’t happy, and can turn a great day into a nightmare.
A personalized client app can help manage bookings more efficiently by allowing customers to easily book, change, and manage their appointments, view booking history, and integrate seamlessly with various platforms.
We’re not saying this is the final solution, but it’s a start in the right direction. Forms are not just standard templates but you can make sure you ask all the right questions and checkboxes before a client can confirm their booking. We all have clients that may not read all their emails, and we may be guilty of that too, but asking the right questions at the right time can make sure clients clearly understand all the requirements before booking into your calendar.
You can create as many custom forms as you need and apply them to all of your services, or only specific ones that may need a little more information from your customer. For example, we’ve created a few forms based on consenting age, and make sure that clients bring the right identification with them, and for minors it’s a different form making sure they bring a guardian and that they also bring a valid piece of ID to the appointment.
We support a growing list of question types but for now we have:
- Free form short and long answers
- Single or multiple choice tick boxes
- Acknowledgement check boxes
- Picture uploads, so that clients can be very specific about what they want.
Use these question templates to ask whatever questions or acknowledgements you need from clients. When you attach forms to services, they’ll appear during the client booking process, so you know they have filled them out before booking with you.
We’ll handle all the notifications
Once your clients make an appointment in your calendar, we’ll handle all the notifications for their upcoming bookings and make sure they can get to your studio on time, and with everything they need for a successful appointment. You can manage all your notifications, when they go out and how often right in your Notification Settings. We’ll manage all the hard stuff like deliverability and privacy and ensure your clients are happy and not overwhelmed with emails.
Store credit cards safely and securely
For the developers and payment aficionados out there, when you think online payments, there’s no comparable to Stripe. That’s why we’ve partnered with Stripe to build our super easy to setup and use payments product. While we’re not a full fledged payment solution yet, we can handle all your online deposits and cancellation fees associated with your booking. Stripe is the best-in-class payment processor with built in security, fraud detection, and data protection on the internet.
Additionally, our system makes it simple to schedule and manage recurring appointments, ensuring clients receive reminders and can efficiently handle their bookings.
But if you don’t want to use any of that, you don’t have to. You can still use BooksOpen for just the scheduling, and handle all the payments with clients directly, whether you want to stay cash-only or process with your own payment provider. You will need to enable payments if you want to use our deposits and cancellation fee services.
Manage appointments, your calendar, clients right in BooksOpen
Great! Now that you’re all set and ready to go, but wait there’s more. Once you have all your preferences and customizations all set up, this is where BooksOpen can really start to shine. We want to build a BooksOpen that can give you all the information about your bookings and your clients right at your fingerprints. Our resource management tools and features are designed to enhance efficiency in scheduling and managing resources like meeting rooms and equipment, eliminating scheduling conflicts and streamlining operations. We have a stack of printed forms and documents and post-it notes in a drawer never to be seen again. While some things need a paper-trail, keeping clean digital records and notes gets the job done 99% of the time.
Your Daily Dashboard
Your BooksOpen dashboard is like your personal homepage for all your appointments, all in one place. It helps prevent double bookings by managing your availability in real-time. It provides your daily calendar at a glance, while keeping you up-to-date with task reminders, appointment confirmations, and upcoming appointments.
Your Calendar
You’ll likely be on this page more than any other. The calendar. It’s the reason why we built BooksOpen, and we kept it super simple and super clean. A full screen page dedicated purely to your calendar so you can keep track of your day, week, or month at a glance. Click into any appointment and see its details, forms, and notes.
Not only that, but when you have walk-in appointments or a customer calls you over the phone, you can click on an empty time slot and schedule appointments right in.
Manual Booking
We know not all of your bookings will come in online. Some clients just want to call in and others passing by your storefront. You’ll always have the ability to add clients into your calendar with the Create Appointment feature to simplify scheduling. Simply select a time that works, find the client if they’ve been there before or create a new client profile, and select the service to schedule. Really easy, and keeps up with the flexibility of your workday.
Your Clients
The client management table is where you can look up details of your clients and handle scheduling meetings efficiently. And we know not all clients are the same, you have your favourite ones, and your not-so-favourite ones. You can manage all that by creating custom booking rules specific to each client. Say you have a notable client and you want to make sure you approve all their booking requests before it goes into your calendar, you can do that but adjusting their Booking Mode.
You’ll also be able to add notes to the client file that only you can see. This will never be visible to any clients. If the client has special needs or requires extra care, you can add a note in for later and as your review your appointments you’ll be able to refer back to the client notes before they come into the studio.
Choosing the Right Scheduling Software
Considerations for selecting a scheduling software
When choosing scheduling software, it’s essential to consider several key factors to ensure it meets your business needs:
- Ease of Use: The software should be intuitive and easy to use for both staff and clients, minimizing the learning curve.
- Customization: Look for software that allows customization of booking pages, scheduling rules, and appointment details to match your specific requirements.
- Integration: Ensure the software can integrate with existing calendars, such as Google Calendar or Microsoft Teams, for seamless synchronization.
- Scalability: The software should be capable of handling multiple locations, staff, and services as your business grows.
- Security: Prioritize software that ensures the security and privacy of client data, protecting sensitive information.
- Customer Support: Reliable customer support and training are crucial for addressing any issues and maximizing the software’s potential.
- Cost: Consider the affordability of the software and whether it offers flexible pricing plans that fit your budget.
By carefully evaluating these factors, businesses can select a scheduling software that enhances their booking process, improves efficiency, and meets their unique needs.
Not just an Online Booking System
Like we said earlier, simple, but not watered down. BooksOpen takes all the complexity out of managing your business and your calendar and put it into an easy to use and elegant experience so you can get away from all the back and forth emails, tying up the phone lines and back to taking care of what’s most important, your clients, your business, and your craft.
As we grow and build BooksOpen, we'll be looking to add more features like seamless management and connection during virtual meetings by integrating with popular platforms such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and others.
We’re all about transparency and working for you, which is why we went with a straight forward flat monthly fee of $49. No commission fees, booking fees, or any of that. $49, unlimited bookings and unlimited clients.
And the best is yet to come. We’re only just getting started. Thanks to our amazing community and early adopters, we’re excited to continue building out the best software for your studio!
