For clinics, salons, barbers, spas and studios. If your left-hand navigation shows Diary, this manual is for you.
The day-to-day screens
| Screen | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | Today at a glance |
| Diary | The day view. Where you spend the day |
| New booking | Take a booking over the phone or at the counter |
| Find booking | Search across every booking, past and future |
| Waitlist | People who wanted a time you did not have |
| Clients | The client record — history, notes, health history |
| Services | What you sell, how long it takes, who performs it |
| Calendars | Push your bookings into Apple/Google Calendar |
| Import | Bring clients and services in from another system |
| Get the code | The snippet to put booking on your own website |
The Diary
The Diary opens on your next ten bookings — a plain list of what is actually coming, which is what most venues want first thing in the morning. Switch to the day view for the timeline: one column per practitioner, bookings laid out against the clock, showing the client, the service and the status colour.
You can reschedule or cancel from the list itself, in a drawer, without leaving the page and without opening the booking.
Booking statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pending | Made online, waiting for you to confirm (or waiting on a deposit) |
| Confirmed | Locked in. The guest has been told |
| Seated | The client has arrived and is in the chair |
| Finished | Done |
| No-show | They did not turn up. Recorded against the client |
| Cancelled | Cancelled by you or by the guest. Can be hidden from the Diary — see 09 |
| Waitlist | On the list, holding no time |
Move a booking through its statuses from the booking itself. Marking no-show is worth doing honestly — it shows on the client record and it is the only way the no-show follow-up notification fires.
Pending vs auto-confirm
This is set once in Settings → Booking confirmation & notice → "New bookings need my confirmation".
- On — every online booking lands as pending. Nothing is promised to the guest until you accept it. Right for tattoo studios, complex treatments, anyone who needs to check before committing.
- Off — online bookings are confirmed instantly and the guest gets a confirmation straight away.
The setting also decides which notification the venue receives — booking requested versus new booking. See Notifications.
Rescheduling and cancelling
Staff can reschedule or cancel any booking from the booking itself, or straight from the upcoming list without opening it. Guests can do it themselves if Settings → Cancelling online is switched on — they use the manage link tied to their booking.
⚠ Silent gap. The self-service reschedule/manage link is not currently included in the confirmation email or SMS. The stock templates tell the guest to phone the venue instead. The self-service page exists and works, but nothing hands the guest its address. If you want guests rescheduling themselves rather than phoning, this needs the manage link added to your confirmation template — contact support.
Services
Services is your price list, and it is what the online booking page is built from.
Each service has:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | Shown to clients on the booking page |
| Price | |
| Duration ("Time with the client") | In minutes |
| Prep time before | Blocked out before the appointment. Not shown to the client |
| Clean-down after | Blocked out after. Turnover, sterilising, resetting the room |
| Notice needed | How far ahead this particular service must be booked |
| Deposit | A fixed amount or a percentage. See Money |
| New bookings need my confirmation | Per-service override of the venue-wide setting |
| Practitioners | Who can perform it |
| Photo URL | Optional image on the booking page |
| Patient questionnaire | Attach an intake form. See Forms |
Visibility
| State | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Bookable online | Appears on the public booking page and the widget |
| Staff-only | You can book it; the public cannot see it |
| Hidden | Not shown anywhere, but still on existing bookings |
| Inactive | Retired. Historic bookings keep it |
A service with no practitioners assigned cannot be booked by anyone. If a service is missing from your booking page, check this first.
Editing a price does not rewrite history
Changing a service price changes what you charge from now on. Bookings already taken keep the price they were sold at, and so do your reports, so a price rise never rewrites what last month actually earned.
Practitioners
Practitioners are the people whose time is bookable. Each has:
- A display name (what the client sees when choosing).
- Working hours — which days and times they are available.
- Time off — holidays, appointments, a long lunch. Time off removes availability immediately, including from bookings already visible on the public page.
- The services they are qualified to perform.
A practitioner marked Not working on a given day shows as unavailable in the diary and offers no online slots.
Practitioners are managed under Services. Whether a practitioner is also a login user is a separate question — see Team & roster.
Clients
The Clients screen holds one record per person, with:
- Contact details.
- Full booking history, including cancellations and no-shows.
- Clinical notes — free text, staff-only, never shown to the client.
- Health history — the answers from any intake form they have completed.
Clinical notes and health history are restricted. A Read-only user can see the client exists; pricing and money are Owner/Manager only.
Exporting clients
Clients → Export produces a CSV of your client list. It is your data. Owner/Manager only.
Forms and intake
Settings → Patient & booking forms lets you build questionnaires and attach them to a service.
- Add questions of type single-line or multi-line answer.
- Publish a form to make it live. Archive one to retire it without destroying the answers already collected.
- Attach a form to a service via the service's "Ask patients to fill in a form" option.
When a service has a form attached, the guest is asked to complete it as part of booking. The answers land on the client record under Health history.
The safety-intake gate
If a booking's intake form has not been reviewed by a practitioner, the diary shows "Safety intake not reviewed" against it. This is a deliberate stop sign for clinical venues: it exists so a treatment is not started on someone whose declared conditions nobody has read. Reviewing it clears the flag.
Waitlist
When a guest wants a time you do not have, they can join the Waitlist.
Waitlist entries move through: waiting → offered → converted, or expired / cancelled.
When a slot frees up, offer it from the waitlist screen. The guest receives a waitlist offer notification and can take it. If they do not respond, the offer expires and the slot returns to general availability.
Waitlist entries hold no time in the diary until they convert.
Calendars
Calendars work in both directions, and they are different features.
Your bookings going OUT
Settings → Bookings & availability → Calendar links publishes your bookings as a subscribable calendar feed, so they appear in Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook alongside everything else in your life.
- Add a calendar.
- Choose whose bookings — the whole venue, or one practitioner.
- Give it a label (e.g. "My iPhone").
- Copy the URL it gives you and subscribe to it in your calendar app.
Points worth knowing:
- The feed is read-only. Editing the event in Apple Calendar changes nothing in BookMyVenue.
- Calendar apps refresh on their own schedule, typically every 15 minutes to a few hours. A booking taken 30 seconds ago will not be on your phone yet. This is the calendar app's behaviour, not a fault.
- The URL is a credential. Anyone holding it can read that calendar. Delete the feed to revoke it.
Outside bookings coming IN
Calendars in the navigation is the other direction: connect a practitioner's own Google or Outlook calendar and the times they are busy there stop being bookable here.
- Add a calendar.
- Paste the practitioner's calendar (.ics) URL — the private/secret address from their Google or Outlook calendar settings.
- Choose which practitioner it belongs to.
From then on, a dentist appointment in someone's personal calendar closes that slot on your booking page, with nobody having to remember to block it out.
This connection is also where the minimum-notice floor comes from. A practitioner whose calendar syncs slowly needs more notice than the venue default, because a booking taken inside that window might land on top of something their calendar has not told us about yet.
Taking a booking yourself
New booking is the counter/phone path:
- Find or create the client.
- Choose the service.
- Choose the practitioner.
- Choose the time — availability is shown the same way the guest sees it.
- Confirm.
Staff-made bookings can use staff-only services and can be placed outside the minimum-notice window, because you are standing there and you know.
Importing from another system
Import brings clients and services across from a CSV or XLSX export, including exports from Fresha.
- Paste the export, or upload the file.
- Map the columns — match their column names to BookMyVenue fields. Anything left Not mapped is ignored.
- Run a dry check first. You get a count of rows that would import, rows that would be skipped, and flagged rows that look wrong.
- Read the flags. Fix the source file if the flags are real.
- Apply.
⚠ Applying an import twice imports it twice. There is no de-duplication pass after the fact. If an import goes wrong, contact support before re-running it.
Next
- Charging deposits → Money & payments
- Emails and texts → Notifications
- Booking on your own website → Embed
- Something is wrong → Troubleshooting
Still stuck? Email [email protected] with your venue name, what you were doing and what happened instead. Please don't send passwords — we will never ask for one.