Booking software for beauty therapists, written around the consultation

Every question you write carries a setting for where it is asked: at booking, on the form, or both. Both is the starting position. The reason the setting exists at all is worth knowing before you decide: a dermatologist wrote six questions she needs for her record and marked all six required, and because a required question in the booking flow blocks the booking, she had put six medical questions between a guest and an appointment. Her own summary was that booking should be as quick and easy as possible.

So the rule of thumb is short. The booking flow gets the questions you need in order to accept the appointment at all — has she had this treatment before, is there anything that would stop you going ahead today. The form gets everything long: the medication list, the allergy list, the skin history, the consent statements, the signature. Nothing is duplicated, because a question set to the form does not appear in the booking flow, and a question set to the booking does not appear on the form.

Six kinds of question: a short answer, a long answer, a multiple choice, a date, a consent tick box with your own statement above it, and a signature she draws on the glass with her finger. That is the whole vocabulary, and it is enough for what this trade sends out.

A question can depend on another one. You write it as: show this only when that answer was this — so the reaction description appears when she says she has reacted before, and stays out of the way of everybody who has not. A question hidden that way is not only invisible, it is not stored either: she was never asked, so there is no blank in her record pretending she declined.

And a question can belong to one treatment instead of all of them. Scope the skin-type and skin-concerns pair to your facials and the peel consent to your peels, and a client booking a spray tan is not handed a page about retinoids.

If you would rather not start from nothing, five ready sets are one click away and every question in them is editable: a patch-test record, a medical history and consultation, a short consent and waiver, a facial consultation, and an aftercare acknowledgement. The facial one asks her to describe her skin type from five options and to write her main concerns in her own words; the consent one asks her to confirm she has disclosed everything relevant, that she understands the risks and the aftercare, and whether she agrees to before and after photographs being kept on her record.

The form is a private web address with a long unguessable key in it. She taps the link, fills it in on her phone, signs, and sends it. There is no account, no password and no app, on her side or yours.

You can send one by hand at any time, or switch on automatic sending and choose how many hours before the appointment it goes — forty-eight is the number it starts at. Email costs nothing. The same link by text costs credits from your balance, which is worth knowing before you set a busy week to text everybody. A request is only marked as sent once a channel actually carried it; before that it stays pending, which is what makes a retry possible rather than silently blocked.

The link stops working thirty days after it was sent, counted from the send and not from the appointment. That is deliberate and it is the kind of limit worth having: until it expired, an unauthenticated address that writes allergies, medical answers and a signature into a named person's record was a live key in an old inbox for as long as that inbox existed.

Answers attach to the appointment and stay on the client's record, so the next time she books you are reading last time's form rather than asking again. Each answer is stored with the question's wording as it stood when she answered, so editing a question later does not rewrite what she was asked.

Two separate places hold what you must not miss. Notes is the scrolling field — she likes the room warm, she brings her mother. Caution is its own field for the one line that has to be seen before you start: the allergy, the sensitivity, the medication. It is separate precisely so every screen showing that client can put it at the top instead of burying it in paragraph four, and it goes nowhere else: it is not a marketing segment and it is not in anything the AI is given to read.

Each treatment carries a duration and, separately, a buffer before it and a buffer after it. The buffers are per treatment rather than global, which matters here more than anywhere: a fifteen-minute lip wax wants nothing either side and a microneedling appointment wants both. When the booking page works out your free times, every appointment already in the diary is widened by its own treatment's buffers — not by the buffers of whatever is being booked next. Your peel keeps its twenty minutes of turnaround even when the booking behind it is a brow wax.

Registering as a beauty therapist puts twelve starting points on your list rather than a blank page — a classic facial at sixty minutes, a deep cleanse at seventy-five, a skin consultation at thirty, microneedling at sixty, a lash lift, a spray tan, make-up and the waxes. They are suggestions with real numbers on them, and the first thing to do is change them to yours.

An add-on is the thing a menu cannot express: the mask, the eye treatment, the extra twenty minutes of extractions. It hangs under a treatment with its own minutes and its own price, she ticks it while booking, and the minutes go into the slot calculation rather than into your evening. Write one once as a library item and attach it to as many treatments as you like, or keep it to the single treatment it belongs to.

What each add-on cost and how long it took is copied onto the booking at the moment she books, so changing your prices next month does not quietly rewrite what she agreed to today.

If a course session genuinely needs two treatments together, she can pick up to six in one visit and only the times where they fit back to back with you are offered, priced and timed as one appointment. The exception is worth knowing: that does not work for anything you sell by the hour or per person, or for a group session.

You see your whole day. What a guest is offered is a choice you make, and in a one-room practice it is the difference between a full afternoon and four appointments with useless gaps between them. Leave it open and every fitting start is offered. Set it to touch what is already there and a new booking has to begin at your opening, at your close, or against an existing appointment. Set it to gaps and only a stretch that fits neatly between two busy blocks is shown. Set it to one start per working block and she is offered the earliest time the treatment fits, and nothing else.

A booking you make or move yourself can overrule your own rules, including an overlap — you are asked to confirm, and both the app and the browser tell you afterwards that the two appointments sit on top of each other. Guests are never offered a time on top of an existing appointment.

The signed form, the answers and the signature hang off that appointment. She can attach up to three photographs to the booking herself — four megabytes each, and three is the hard ceiling rather than a suggestion — which for this trade is usually the reaction she is worried about or the product she has been using. Your own before and after shots go on her record with a caption and stay private to you unless you move one into your gallery.

Every picture here is uploaded, never referenced. You will not find a field anywhere asking for the address of an image stored elsewhere, and that absence was argued for rather than forgotten: a linked photograph depends on a machine nobody here controls, and a client's consented before-and-after is not something to leave in somebody else's hands.

A pass is one named treatment, a number of sessions, a price and a validity period — ninety days unless you change it. She buys it on your booking page, either by card straight into your own Stripe account, or by asking for it and paying you in person, in which case you press Approve when the money has arrived. Only the paid card webhook can activate the online one, so an abandoned checkout can never be turned into a free course by a well-meant click.

Redemption is a code, typed. She types it when she books, or you use her pass for her at the counter, and one session comes off. Nothing redeems itself in the background — and one appointment can never take two sessions, because the database refuses a second usage row for the same pass on the same booking. That rule exists because two scans of one pass on one appointment once burned two of somebody's ten sessions.

The precise limit: a pass names one treatment. A course that alternates a peel and a microneedling session is two passes, not one, and there is no open-ended membership.

Link the Stripe account that is in your own name, then choose how much a booking has to bring with it — a share of the price, a flat sum, or payment in full before she arrives. We add nothing on top: the payment code contains no platform fee at all, so the only deduction is Stripe's and everything else is already yours.

The part worth setting up properly is the per-treatment override. Your consultation can take nothing, your microneedling can take a deposit, and your course can take its whole price, all on the same booking page — the treatment's own rule wins, and a rule that is somehow malformed falls back to your salon-wide policy rather than to nothing. A long-standing client can be exempted on her own record, and that exemption is checked first, so it beats a new-guests-only deposit rule.

One default is worth reading before you rely on it: the deposit retention window starts at zero, and zero means a cancelled deposit is refunded. Retention applies strictly inside the window you set, a cancellation exactly on the boundary is refunded, and a cancellation you make yourself refunds whatever the setting says.

Late cancellations and no-shows work the other way round: she saves her card when she books and the charge is taken afterwards. A no-show charge fires by itself sixty minutes past the point the appointment was due to finish. That gap exists so a wrongly tapped no-show can be taken back before any money moves, and if you would rather authorise each one by hand the automatic charge can be switched off altogether. And there is a floor under all of it: where the amount would come out under what the card networks will process — thirty pence in Britain — nothing is charged and no card is retained in the first place.

From your own calendar you can lay the whole course down while she is putting her coat on. Pick the gap you want between visits — seven days, fourteen, twenty-one or twenty-eight — say how many appointments the course runs to, up to a dozen, and they all take the hour she is sitting in now. Anything that would land on top of something already in the diary is left out and named, so you find out on the spot rather than in week nine. Her confirmation email offers the same intervals if she would rather do it herself, up to eight.

Two things about a run that it is better to learn here than in week nine. Each date is an independent appointment with its own status — approving one approves that date, moving one moves one, and there is no editing the series as a series. And a repeating appointment carries a single treatment, so a course that alternates two treatments goes in as two runs.

Reminders are a list of times rather than one: forty-eight hours, twenty-four and two, if that is what your no-show pattern asks for. Email is unlimited and costs nothing; a text is sent from a prepaid credit balance and sends nothing at all until you switch it on. Those two are the only channels there are — the phone notifications in Slotora go to your own devices, never to a client's.

There is a ready aftercare acknowledgement — she confirms she has received the instructions and understands how to look after the treated area, leaves a contact for follow-up questions, and signs. It is a real form and it lands on her record like any other.

But automatic sending only looks forward: it finds confirmed appointments that have not happened yet, up to a fortnight ahead, and sends the form before them. Nothing in Slotora sends a form after an appointment. If you want the aftercare acknowledgement signed on the day, send it from her record when she leaves — it takes a moment, and it is better to know that now than to switch automatic sending on and assume it covers the back end too.