Troubleshooting

Symptom → likely cause → fix.

Ordered roughly by how often each one comes up. The ones marked ⚠ Silent failure are the ones where the screen looks completely correct and nothing is wrong to look at — those are worth reading even when you are not currently broken.

Bookings

A service isn't showing on my booking page

Check these in order — it is almost always one of them:

1. Is the service bookable online? Staff-only and hidden services never show publicly.
2. Does it have at least one practitioner assigned? A service with none cannot be booked by anybody. This is the most common cause.
3. Is that practitioner rostered for the days you expect? Not rostered means no slots.
4. Is there a closure covering those dates — venue-wide or on that practitioner?
5. Does the service's notice needed rule out every remaining time? A service needing 48 hours' notice shows nothing at all if you are only looking at tomorrow.

No times are available at all

Beyond the list above: check Settings → Minimum booking notice, and check your opening hours and repeating days off. A venue accidentally set to "closed every day" shows a perfectly functional booking page with nothing on it.

A booking is in the diary at the wrong time

Settings → Regional → Timezone. If it is wrong, everything is wrong by the same amount, consistently. Fix the timezone; existing bookings are stored as real moments and will display correctly afterwards.

Bookings are arriving as "pending" and I want them instant

Settings → Booking confirmation & notice → "New bookings need my confirmation" — switch it off. Note individual services can override this, so check the service too.

A guest booked twice

They usually did. Check Find booking for their name before assuming a duplication bug.

Notifications

Silent failure — I'm not getting texts when bookings come in

There are two independent switches, and if either is off nothing is sent and nothing looks wrong:

1. Settings → "Text me when a booking comes in" must be on.
2. The venue-notification SMS templates must be active.

And then the trap that catches almost everyone:

1. The venue phone number must be a mobile. A landline cannot receive a text. The message is rejected by the carrier and nothing reaches you, with no error in the app.

As at August 2026 nearly every venue on the platform had a landline in that field, and venue SMS had never been delivered to any of them — while guest texts went out perfectly, because guests give mobile numbers.

Fix: put a mobile (04xx) in the venue phone field in Settings. If the venue's public number genuinely must stay a landline, venue SMS is not available for them today — tell support rather than leaving it switched on and silently broken.

How to verify: make a real booking and look at the phone. Do not verify by looking at the toggle.

A guest didn't get their confirmation

1. Spam folder. This is the answer most of the time.
2. Typo in the email address on the booking.
3. Is the Booking confirmed template active for the email channel?
4. If none of those, it is ours — send the booking reference to support.

Notifications arrive at odd hours

Timezone. See above.

Guests are ringing to reschedule instead of doing it themselves

Expected, currently. The self-service manage page exists and works, but the stock confirmation template does not include the link to it — it tells the guest to phone you. Getting that link into your confirmation template needs support. This is a known gap.

Money and payments

The payment page won't load / guests can't pay

Check the Stripe connection status first. A Stripe onboarding that was started but never finished is the usual cause. Stripe requires business details, ID and a bank account before it will process live payments.

A guest paid but the booking still says pending

Give it a few seconds — the bank's confirmation has to come back. If it persists:

• Do not take the payment again.
• Check the booking's status, not the guest's screenshot.
• Send us the booking reference.

A guest abandoned the payment page and the slot is still blocked

It should release on its own — unpaid bookings are held only briefly, deliberately, so a guest typing their card in doesn't lose the slot. If a slot is genuinely stuck, cancel the pending booking from the diary.

Staff can't see today's takings

Working as intended. Money is Owner and Manager only. They will see an explicit refusal rather than a blank screen, so it can't be mistaken for a zero-takings day.

The tax invoice has no ABN on it

Settings → tax details. Enter the ABN (11 digits) and the legal / registered business name.

Till and drawer

The drawer is short or over

That is the till doing its job. The variance is recorded, not corrected. Investigate it; do not re-enter the count to make it balance.

"Already taken"

The order has already been paid for. Do not take it again — check the order first.

The Z-report says "Day still open"

A drawer session has not been closed. Close it, then run the Z. Numbers on an open day are provisional.

"No takings recorded for this day" on a day we definitely traded

Check the business day boundary in Settings → Regional first — for a late-trading venue, the night may have landed on the adjacent report. If it genuinely isn't there, that is a support ticket with the date and the venue name.

Orders and kitchen

Orders aren't appearing on the kitchen screen

1. Is the screen still paired? "Pair this screen" means it is not.
2. "Connecting…" for more than a few seconds means the tablet has lost its connection — check its wifi.
3. Check the order actually reached the state that sends it to the kitchen.

Dockets aren't printing

In order:

1. Paper, and the paper path — is the lid properly closed?
2. Power and network lights on the printer.
3. Is the printer on the same network it was configured on? A new router, a changed wifi password or a guest network silently orphans it.
4. Was the docket queued but never confirmed? That means the printer is not collecting it — a network or printer fault, not a BookMyVenue one.

A printer that lost power mid-print re-fetches the same docket, so a power blip does not skip an order.

An item can't be ordered and I don't know why

If it has a required option group and every choice in that group is sold out, the item stops being orderable — deliberately, so nobody orders a parma with a sauce you don't have. Put a choice back on and the item returns.

"You do not have permission to change orders"

That user's role is Staff or Read-only. Changing orders is Owner/Manager.

Your website

The booking button doesn't appear on my website

1. Look in a private/incognito window. Your own browser is very likely showing you a cached copy of the page. This is the cause more often than anything else.
2. Is the snippet on every page, or only one? Use the site-wide footer / "body end" option, not a single page's content block.
3. Is it inside a content block that strips scripts? Many page builders sanitise scripts pasted into a rich-text area. Use the platform's custom-code / code-injection setting instead.
4. Does the snippet still have the ?v= on the end of the script address? Removing it makes caching much worse.
5. Check the venue slug in the snippet matches your public address in Settings. A wrong slug shows a "contact the venue" message rather than a raw error — so a booking form that loads but says that is a slug problem.

I changed my public address and now links are broken

Changing the slug breaks every link already published — menus, business cards, Google listings, old Facebook posts. There is no automatic redirect. Change slugs early or not at all.

The form looks wrong / clashes with my site

It shouldn't — the booking form runs in an iframe precisely so your theme and ours cannot touch each other. If it genuinely looks broken, send us the page address.

Access and logins

Someone can't log in

1. Correct address — app.bookmyvenue.com.au, not the marketing site.
2. Use the password reset link. Support cannot read a password back, only reset it.
3. Check the user is still active and still has a role at that venue. "Your account holds no role here" means exactly that.

"This venue no longer exists. Pick another from the menu."

The venue was removed, or that user's access to it was. If that is a surprise, contact support.

A staff member can see something they shouldn't

Check their role in Team. Money, menu edits, refunds, settings and reports are all Owner/Manager. If someone with the Staff role really can see money, that is a serious bug — report it immediately with the screen and the username.

Calendar feeds

My bookings aren't in Apple/Google Calendar

Calendar apps refresh on their own schedule — every few minutes at best, often hours. A booking taken a minute ago will not be there yet. This is the calendar app's behaviour and cannot be sped up from our side.

I edited the event in my calendar and nothing changed here

The feed is read-only by design. Edit the booking in BookMyVenue.

I need to revoke a calendar link

Delete the link. Anyone holding it can read that calendar until you do — treat it like a password.

When to contact support

Email [email protected] with:

• Your venue name.
• What you were doing when it went wrong.
• The booking, order or function reference if there is one.
• What you expected and what happened instead.
• A screenshot, if there was anything on screen.
• The date and time it happened, and your timezone.

Please do not send passwords. We will never ask for one.

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.