Appointments

One scheduling engine that fits your trade. Whether you run a dental practice, a plumbing firm, a salon, a tutoring service, or a haulage company, you set it up in your own words and it works the way you already work.

Start here

The fastest way in is a template. Go to Appointments → Services → Start from a template, pick your industry, then the closest match to your business.

A template sets up your services, your statuses, any checklists, and the words the product uses. Everything it creates is yours. Rename it, change it, delete it. If nothing matches, start from scratch and build exactly what you need, then save your setup as your own template.

Nothing is locked. There is no "dentist mode" or "plumber mode" underneath - just settings you can change at any time.

Your services

A service is anything someone can book: a consultation, a callout, a class, an inspection. For each one you set:

How it runs and where it happens. Pick from the list, or type your own and choose "Add" if your business does something the list does not cover.
How long it takes, plus any travel or tidy-up time either side.
An arrival window instead of an exact time, if you are a trade. The customer sees "between 8am and 1pm" and the whole window is held for you.
Places per slot. Leave it at 1 for one-to-one. Set it higher and it becomes a class, with an attendee list and an automatic waiting list.
What it needs at the same time. A dental appointment needs a dentist and a chair. A callout needs an engineer and a van. We only offer a time when everything you listed is free at once.
Who can deliver it, and how long it takes them. A senior stylist may take 30 minutes where a junior takes 45, and the diary respects that.
Questions to ask at booking - anything you want, in any order.

Team, rooms, and hours

Add everything a booking needs on Team and resources: people, rooms, vehicles, equipment. Give each one its working hours, and add holidays or time off as exceptions.

The type list is yours to extend. If none of the built-in types fit, type your own in the Type box and pick "Add" - a chair, a studio, a kennel, a pitch. Your services can then require it in the same way they require a team member.

Times you offer come from these hours minus whatever is already booked, so you never have to keep two calendars in step. Daylight saving is handled for you: 9am stays 9am on both sides of a clock change.

Share a booking link

Go to Appointments → Booking links → New link.
Name it, and choose whether it offers all your services or just one.
Copy the link and share it anywhere - your email signature, a text message, social media, a QR code.

Anyone with the link can pick a time and book. They do not need an account, and neither do you need to be online. They get a confirmation with an add-to-calendar button and a link to reschedule or cancel themselves.

Taking payment

You can charge for a booking, and the money goes straight into your own Stripe account. Set this per booking link under Appointments → Booking links → New link → Payment:

No payment - the default. Nothing about money is shown.
Offer payment - the booking is confirmed straight away, then a Pay now button appears on the confirmation and on their manage page. They can pay online or settle when they arrive.
Require payment - the slot is held while they pay on Stripe. The booking is only confirmed once the payment clears. If they abandon it, the slot is released automatically after 15 minutes so your diary does not silently fill with unpaid holds.

The amount comes from the price on each service, so someone booking a follow-up pays the follow-up price. Set prices under Appointments → Services.

Payment is verified by Stripe on our servers, never in the customer's browser, so a booking cannot be marked paid unless the money actually cleared.

The first time you switch payment on, we will offer to set up Stripe for you. That installs the Payments service and takes you to Stripe to connect your account, then brings you back to finish the link. Until Stripe is connected you cannot create a paid link, because anyone using it would hit an error at the moment they tried to book.

Put it on your website

On the same page, copy the one-line snippet and paste it into your site. The booking form appears inline, styled to match. If you use the SoftSolz AI Website Builder, just connect Appointments from the Integrations tab and it places the booking page for you.

Working the diary

The calendar has day, week, month, agenda, and a side-by-side team view. The board view groups everything by status so you can see what is waiting on what.

Open any booking to see its full history, add notes, work through an on-site checklist with photos, capture a signature, and move it to the next status. Statuses are yours to define - a garage might run Booked, In bay, Awaiting parts, Ready, Collected.

Reminders and replies

Email reminders work straight away with no setup. To send by SMS or WhatsApp, or to call customers from your business number, add your own provider account under Settings → Messaging and calling. Text messages and calls go through Twilio; WhatsApp goes through Meta, whose WhatsApp Business Platform is the only route WhatsApp itself supports for this.

You use your own provider account, so messages come from your number and you stay in control of what you spend. We check your credentials before saving them, then load your numbers so you can pick which one to send from.

Paste the inbound webhook address we show you into your provider, and customers can reply YES to confirm or C to cancel. Their reply updates the booking and appears on their conversation history.

Message a whole list, and answer the replies

Under Messages you can send one approved message to many people at once, with a picture, a video, or a PDF at the top, and then answer everyone who replies in one place. It sends from the same provider account you set up for reminders.

Sending a campaign

Give the campaign a name, pick one of the message templates your provider has approved, and add the attachment its top slot expects. WhatsApp decides what that can be: a picture (JPG or PNG, up to 5 MB), a video (MP4, up to 16 MB), or a PDF. Word and Excel files are not accepted at the top of a template, so send those as a link in the message instead.

Choose who gets it: your contacts, filtered by tag and by whether they agreed to messages, a contact book you have saved, a list you upload as a CSV, or any combination. We remove duplicates for you.

If your template has blanks in it, such as Hi {{1}}, your order is ready, you say what goes in each one: either the person's name, so everyone gets their own, or the same wording for everybody. A list you upload can fill those blanks per person instead.

You can send it yourself once you are happy, or set a date and time and let it go out on its own. A scheduled campaign still waits for you to review who gets it first.

Before anything goes out, you see how many people it reaches and exactly who is being skipped and why: no phone number, no agreement to messages, replied STOP, a duplicate row, or a number we cannot read. You confirm, then watch sent, delivered, read, and failed counts fill in as it runs. You can pause, resume, or stop a campaign at any point, though messages already sent cannot be recalled.

Only message people who asked to hear from you: it protects your number as well as your reputation.

WhatsApp's own limit on a new number

Separately from your plan, WhatsApp itself limits how many people a number can message in 24 hours. A brand new number usually starts at 250 and moves up to 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and then no limit at all, on its own, as WhatsApp sees you sending without people blocking or reporting you. You do not apply for this and there is nothing to configure. Your number's current limit is shown at the top of the Messages page.

If a campaign reaches that limit part way through, nothing is lost and nobody is marked as failed. The campaign pauses, everyone still waiting stays in the queue, and we tell you in plain language what happened and roughly when it will carry on. Sending restarts by itself once the window resets, and you can also press Resume yourself. The same is true if WhatsApp briefly asks you to slow down: it pauses for a few minutes rather than throwing messages away.

Reminders behave the same way. A text or WhatsApp reminder that lands on the limit is retried later rather than being marked failed, so the customer still gets it.

How many messages your plan includes

Every outbound text and WhatsApp message counts against a monthly allowance that comes with your plan: 100 on Free, 3,000 on Basic, 20,000 on Growth, and 50,000 on Business. Campaign sends, inbox replies, auto replies, and SMS or WhatsApp reminders all draw from the same pool; email and in-app reminders do not. The allowance resets at the start of each billing period.

You can see what is left at the top of the Messages page. If a campaign needs more messages than you have left, we tell you before it sends rather than stopping halfway. If you run out while one is running, it pauses and we let you know, so you can upgrade and resume it. You send through your own Twilio or Meta account, so their charges are separate and billed by them.

If you message a whole list regularly, Growth is the plan to be on. Change plan under Subscriptions and the new allowance applies straight away. Need a different number? Ask us about a custom package - we can set any allowance for your workspace.

Contact books

A contact book is a list of numbers you keep and reuse, for the people who are not customers with a booking history - a supplier list, a members list, everyone who came to last year's open day. Create one under Messages → Contact books, then add numbers by typing them, pasting them in, or uploading a CSV, and pick the book as the audience next time you send. Numbers need their country code, and anything we cannot read is listed back to you rather than silently dropped.

The inbox

Replies land in Messages → Inbox, grouped into a conversation per person. Four folders: all open, needs an owner, assigned to me, and closed. Search by name, by a word from the last message, or by phone number typed any way at all. Assign a conversation to a colleague so two people do not answer the same person, and close it when it is done. A closed conversation reopens by itself if they write again.

Each message shows how far it got, using WhatsApp's own ticks: one grey tick sent, two grey ticks delivered, two blue ticks seen. Blue only ever appears when WhatsApp actually tells us it was read, which it will not do if the person has read receipts switched off. Opening a thread marks it read for the whole team, and Mark unread puts it back for the next person.

WhatsApp only lets you reply freely for 24 hours after someone writes to you. Inside that window you just type. After it, we swap the box for a picker of your approved templates and tell you why, and their next reply opens a fresh 24 hours.

Answering common questions automatically

If you have Knowledge Hub installed, turn on Settings → Auto reply and pick one knowledge collection to answer from. Anything it is not confident about, anything it cannot find an answer for, and anything containing a word you list (such as refund or complaint) goes to your team instead of being guessed at. It also stands down as soon as one of your team replies, whether or not they took ownership of the conversation. To silence it for one person without switching it off for everyone, use the auto reply switch on that conversation.

Make it speak your language

Under Settings → Your words, rename the four things the product talks about. A vet sees Patient and Animal. A haulier sees Job and Vehicle. A school sees Student and Tutor. Change them once and the whole product follows.

Reports

See how the diary is performing over any period: how much was booked, completion and cancellation rates, no-shows, revenue, how busy each person was, and how many customers came back.

No-show risk is worked out from real attendance history, not a guess, so a customer badge only appears once there is enough history to mean something.