Services and bookings

You’ll need: Services, Bookings — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

If your business sells time or expertise rather than objects, service items are how you describe that publicly — 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 subcategory, which is what lets visitors browse rather than scroll. Rank orders your list, and locations says where the service is offered — connecting back to the business locations from Essentials.

Hourly rates are optional: switch on has hourly rates and give the rate, or leave it off and discuss price privately. Both are legitimate; a service with no published price is not an incomplete record.

Turning on bookings

Mark a service bookable and give it opening hours, and the public page gains a booking form. Opening hours are per service, not per business, because a consultation offered on Tuesday mornings is not constrained by the fact your office is open all week.

Location capacities cover how many bookings a location can take at once, so two chairs means two simultaneous appointments rather than one.

A booking contact is who gets told.

   service_item                 booking
   -----------------            -----------------
   what you offer               one customer, one slot
   bookable + opening_hours     date, time, name, phone
   location_capacities          status

Bookings are records like any other

A booking arrives as a record with the customer’s name, phone, email, the date and time, notes, and a status. It goes into a list you work through, and it carries an audit trail like everything else — so “who confirmed this and when” is answerable.

That also means bookings obey the same maker-checker rules as the rest of FeePrime. If your saves land in Pending elsewhere, expect the same here.

The mistake: opening hours nobody meant

Publishing a bookable service with generous opening hours and no capacity limit is how a single practitioner ends up with four appointments at nine o’clock on Monday. The form will honour exactly what you configured, cheerfully.

Set the hours to the hours you will actually honour, then set capacity to the number of people who can genuinely be served at once.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, make a service bookable, give it narrow opening hours, then 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.