Services – Bookly Help Center

Services are the types of appointments customers will be able to book.

They can be provided by all staff or only by specific team members.

Group services into Categories, which customers will be able to choose from before they select a service. For the plugin to function properly, each service must be included in a category, which means that you'll need to create at least one (default) category and put all services in it.

Create and edit categories and services from your Bookly menu > Services.

The order of services in your booking form

Click and use drag & drop to set up how your list of services will be viewable on the front-end. This list can be reordered at any time.

Table settings

Click in the upper right corner of the page to choose columns that you want to include in the Services table. Reorder the columns by using the drag & drop option.

Properties of Services

Please note that settings described below are available with Bookly Pro installed and activated. The free version of Bookly has limited functionality.

Color

Color-code appointments of this service in the calendar in your Bookly menu. The color will not be shown to your clients at any point.

Visibility

Use "public" by default. The "private" setting is for the times when you need to take down a previously active service.

Price

Service cost will be shown to the client during booking for their review and confirmation of the booking. Setting the price here does not require that you set up online payment because you can give clients the option of offline payment, too.

Duration

It is the length of an appointment. You can set it from 5 minutes to 7 days. You can set start and end times of the appointment for services with the duration of 1 day or longer. This time will be displayed in notifications to customers.

Padding time

Determine a short time period around an appointment used for clean-up, preparation, or just rest. That time cannot be used for another booking. For example, you can set padding for 15 mins after appointment with 1 hour service duration. This means that the next available time slot for booking will be 15 mins after the booked appointment. So if the first appointment is at 08:00 am, the next availability will be at 09:15 am.

Time slot length

This setting allows you to divide the length of the day into slots – time interval which is used as a step when building all time slots for the service at the Time step. This setting overrides global settings in Settings > General > Time slot length. Use Default to apply global settings.

Providers

Providers are your staff members that clients will be able to choose from as the person providing the service. A service has to be assigned to at least one provider to appear in the Service drop-down menu in the booking form.

Providers preference for ANY

Allows you to define the rule of staff members auto assignment when customers schedule an appointment on your website and don’t have a staff member preference (when they select ANY option in a 'provider' drop-down).

Bookly will automatically choose a staff member for any selected service as per your settings.

The feature works as follows:

Specified order – appointment will be assigned to the available staff member in a specified order of priorities;
Most/least occupied that day – appointment will be assigned to the most/least occupied staff member on the date of appointment (see how it works when customers book unscheduled appointments here);
Most/least occupied for period – Bookly will assign the appointment to the most/least occupied staff member taking into account provider's occupancy at a selected period;
Most/least expensive – appointment will be assigned to the staff member with the highest/lowest service price. If the price is the same, the system will select the first staff member in a list.

Pick random staff member in case of uncertainty

When enabled and both employees meet the criteria chosen in "Providers preference for ANY", the system will pick a random staff member. When disabled, the system will take the first staff member from the list.

Info

In this field, you can write any kind of text and then have it automatically used in notifications to clients, booking form wording, etc.

Limit appointments per customer

Set the limit of service bookings per customer in any given period. Restriction may end after a fixed period or with the beginning of the next calendar period – new day, week, month, etc.

Example #1: if you limit the number of appointments to 2 upcoming bookings, this will mean that a customer won't be able to book more than 2 appointments during the available booking period which depends on the free time slots availability and values set in Number of days available for booking, Minimum time requirement prior to booking.

Example #2: if you limit the number of appointments to 2 bookings per 24 hours/7 days/30 days/365 days, this will mean that a customer will be able to book only 2 appointments during the selected period. The restriction will end after this period is over.

Example #3: if you limit the number of appointments to 2 bookings per day/week/month/year, the restriction will end with the beginning of the new day/week/month/year.

Once your customer exceeds the limit, they will see this message:

"You are trying to use the service too often. Please contact us to make a booking."

This message can be changed in the Appearance > Done step > Form view in case the number of bookings exceeds the limit.