Every booking rule and booking-page setting

These are the rules that decide whether a time is offered and whether a booking is accepted. They apply to the whole business rather than per service or per person, and there are seventeen of them. Most live at Settings → Booking settings; three sit where they are used — search listing on Settings → Website & booking page, reminders on Settings → Customer notifications, and your confirmation email text on Settings → Email Templates. Each is saved on its own, so changing one page never puts back a setting someone changed on another.

One thing worth knowing before the list. Most of these are enforced twice — once on your booking page, and again when the booking is submitted — so they hold however the booking arrives. Three are enforced on the booking page only, and they are called out where they appear: slot spacing, billing details, and requiring a state or province.

When customers may book

Minimum notice

min_notice_hours, in hours, default 2. A time closer than this is not offered and is refused if submitted.

Set it to 24 and today disappears from your page. Set it to 0 and someone can book the next slot; the past is still refused.

Worked example. A barbershop sets 2 hours, so nobody books a cut that starts while the barber is mid-cut on someone else. A mobile physiotherapist who travels between visits sets 24, because tomorrow's route has to be planned tonight.

A day whose times have all fallen past the cutoff shows as having no times rather than as closed — your page never tells a customer you are shut when you are simply booked up or too late.

How far ahead

max_advance_days, in days, default 60. Days beyond it are greyed out on your booking page and refused if submitted.

Careful with this one: clearing the box saves a zero rather than "no limit", and a zero makes your page effectively unbookable. If you want a long horizon, type a large number.

A running promotion can shorten this horizon for the services it features, never extend it.

Slot spacing

slot_duration, in minutes, default 15. It is the spacing between offered start times, and it has nothing to do with how long a service takes. At 15 minutes a 30-minute service is offered at 09:00, 09:15, 09:30. At 30 minutes you get tidier blocks and the customer gets less choice.

Enforced on your booking page only. A booking submitted directly at an off-grid time is accepted as long as it clears your hours, notice and conflicts. In practice this only matters if something other than your booking page is creating bookings.

In the booking dialog it is a suggestion. The start times your team is offered when making or moving a booking follow the same spacing, but anyone can choose another time — any day, to the minute — and sees what it clashes with, and confirms it, before saving.

Clearing the box saves a zero here too, which produces a broken grid. Type a number.

Whether you approve bookings

auto_confirm, default on. With it on, a booking arrives confirmed. With it off, it arrives pending and nothing is agreed until someone on your team accepts it.

The customer is not told the booking is pending. They receive the standard confirmation email, and your booking page thanks them the same way either way. The word "pending" appears only if they open the manage-booking link. So if you turn approval on, tell customers in your confirmation text (email_footer, below) that you will be in touch to confirm — otherwise they will believe they have an appointment.

Turning it off is right when you need to check you can actually do the job. It is wrong if nobody is watching the dashboard, because a pending booking is a customer waiting.

Bookings your own team creates, waiting-list acceptances and event registrations are always confirmed; this setting governs your booking page.

Cancellation

The window

cancellation_hours, in hours, default 24. Outside it, a customer can cancel or reschedule themselves — from the link in their confirmation email, or from My Bookings — and a cancelled slot frees immediately. Inside it, both are replaced by a line saying online changes have closed, with your phone number and email address.

It is one number for the whole business — not per service, not per person — and the same number for cancelling and rescheduling. A customer's new time must still meet your minimum notice, how far ahead and slot spacing, exactly as a new booking on your page does; the server checks all three for a reschedule. See Cancellations, reschedules and no-shows.

Late cancellation

allow_late_cancellation, default off. With it on, a customer inside the window can still cancel, after a confirmation step warning them they may be charged. The booking is recorded as a late cancellation. It never allows a late reschedule: inside the window the customer can only cancel, or contact you to move it.

Nothing is charged. Bookodile does not take payments, so this records what happened and leaves the charging to you. The switch only appears when the window is greater than zero, because at zero nothing is ever late.

The same step appears when a customer cancels from My Bookings (the customer portal) as on the booking's own page.

What customers must enter

These three are set once for the whole business, not per branch — a customer shares their details with a business as a whole. With one branch you change them here, in the Customer contact fields card. With several, the business owner changes them in Settings → Organization, and each branch's Booking settings shows them read-only.

require_name, default on. Every booking needs a name whatever this is set to. With it on, a customer who confirms their email also cannot hide their name from you (Customer details a customer controls).

require_email, default on, and require_phone, default on. A required detail must be entered to book, and a customer who confirms their email cannot hide it from you. Each is independent, but the settings screen will not let you turn both off, because you need some way to reach the customer.

A phone number, required or not, has to be a real one: the right length and a real prefix for its country. A number typed without its country code is read as one from your branch's country — 0908 687 123 at a Slovak branch, 608 123 456 at a Czech one — and one with + or 00 is read as typed, so a visitor from abroad gives their own number as usual. The booking page says so before the customer can continue, rather than taking a number nobody can call.

Turning email off has consequences worth weighing: without an email address that customer gets no confirmation, no reminder and no cancellation notice, and the manage-booking link lives in the confirmation email. They also cannot be matched to their previous visits, because returning customers are recognised by email — every booking creates a new record instead.

Billing details

invoice_mode is off, optional or required. Set to required, your booking page asks for company name, street, city, postal code and country before it will submit. invoice_require_state adds state or province to that list, and only does anything in required mode.

Both are enforced on your booking page only. A booking submitted directly can omit billing details even when the setting says required.

Worked example. A physiotherapy clinic invoicing employers, and a photography studio invoicing companies for shoots, both set this to required so the details arrive with the booking instead of being chased afterwards. A hair salon leaves it off.

The country dropdown starts from your business's own country.

Consent and privacy

gdpr_consent_enabled, default on, shows a consent checkbox on your booking page and refuses the booking without it. On Booking settings it is the Privacy consent card — Privacy consent (GDPR) for a business whose country, in Business profile, is in the EU, the EEA or the UK. The name follows the country, never the language the business writes in, and it is a label, not a statement that anything is compliant.

gdpr_text replaces the default sentence beside that checkbox with your own wording. You write it once, in your main language; when your business has other languages, Bookodile translates it into each of them by itself, and a customer reading the booking page in another language sees it in that language — or as you wrote it, until its translation is written. See translations under the field shows the translations to correct by hand (Other languages your customers read).

privacy_policy_url adds a link to your own privacy policy beside ours.

When a customer ticks the box, their customer card records that they agreed, when, and which version of your wording and policy link they saw. With the checkbox off, nothing is recorded as agreed — the card's consent reads "No".

One consequence to know: the privacy links live inside the consent block, so switching consent off also removes your privacy-policy link from the page.

Whether you need any of this, and what it must say, depends on where you trade and is yours to check. Bookodile gives you the switch and the wording; it does not advise on the law.

Reminders

reminder_enabled, default on, and reminder_timing, default the day before. Both are on Settings → Customer notifications, beside the switch that pauses everything, and a change there saves at once.

The timing choices are the day before at 8am in your business's time zone, two hours before, or both. Nothing else — the hour is fixed and the options are not arbitrary.

A reminder goes to the customer's email address, and by SMS as well when your business sends SMS (see Limits); a customer with neither gets none. It is skipped entirely while all customer messages are paused. A booking with several parts sends one reminder, not one per part.

Your confirmation email text

email_footer adds your own paragraph to the confirmation email, below the booking details. Line breaks are kept. It is plain text: code such as HTML shows exactly as typed rather than as formatting or a link. It is on Settings → Email Templates, above the emails themselves, with a button that shows it in the confirmation.

It appears in the confirmation only — not in reminders and not in cancellations. Email templates cannot otherwise be edited. When your business has other languages, Bookodile translates the paragraph into each of them, and a confirmation in another language carries it in that language; See translations under it shows them to correct by hand.

Being found in search

search_indexable, on unless you turn it off, on Settings → Website & booking page next to your page's address, labelled Show my business in search results. Your booking page is listed with search engines so it can come up when somebody searches for your business by name, and your own description is what appears underneath it.

Turning it off removes the page from our sitemap and asks search engines to leave it out — and the same goes for your public reviews page, your events pages and your website, which this one switch covers too. Your page keeps working and anyone with the link can still book. A business with a private clientele — a members-only gym, a coach who works by referral — turns it off and shares the link directly.

Bing and the other search engines that support IndexNow are told within minutes whenever your page is listed, unlisted, or changes how it appears in results — its name, description, address, language, phone, website or logo. Google does not support IndexNow: it notices when it next reads the page or our sitemap, and usually takes a few weeks to drop a page it has already listed. Whether and where a page is shown is always the search engine's decision.

When your team moves a visit

These rules are written for customers. When someone on your team moves a visit with several services from the calendar (Move visit), the times it suggests are the ones where every service fits — each team member's working hours, time off, blocked time and other bookings, and the capacity and hours of any room or equipment — laid out on your slot spacing. Minimum notice and how far ahead do not apply; only times already in the past are left out. Your team can also type any other start, and is shown what it clashes with before moving the visit anyway. Dragging one of the visit's services in the calendar runs the same checks, and asks before moving the visit onto a clash.

Team member order

Settings → Booking settings → Team member order is the order your booking page lists your team in when a customer chooses who serves them — the same list you can drag in Settings → Members; both edit one order (employees.sort_order). It is also the order "Anyone" goes through: the first person in it who is free gets the booking. Only people who are active and take bookings are listed; someone switched off keeps their place for when they are back, and someone new joins at the end.

It is the default for every service. A service, or a whole service category, can have a custom order instead — see who customers see first. This is not one of the seventeen booking rules: it decides who is offered first, never whether a time is offered.

Worked examples

A barbershop taking walk-ins as well as bookings. Minimum notice 2 hours, 60 days ahead, 15-minute spacing, auto-confirm on, 12-hour cancellation window with late cancellation off. Email required, phone required, billing off.

A physiotherapy clinic. Minimum notice 24 hours, 90 days ahead, 30-minute spacing, auto-confirm off because each new patient is screened first — with a confirmation text saying so. Cancellation window 24 hours with late cancellation allowed. Billing details required, state not required.

A nail studio. Minimum notice 3 hours, 45 days ahead, 15-minute spacing, auto-confirm on, 24-hour window. Reminders set to both, because no-shows cost a whole appointment.

Limits

• Every rule here is business-wide. None of them can differ per service, per team member or per location within a branch.
• Three are enforced on your booking page only: slot spacing, billing details and requiring a state. A customer's reschedule is the exception for slot spacing — the server holds the new time to it.
• A pending booking looks confirmed to the customer. Say so in your confirmation text if you turn auto-confirm off.
• Late cancellation charges nothing. It records the fact.
• Reminder timing is one of three fixed choices, and the day-before hour is not configurable.
• Consent text is written once, in your main language; its translations into your other languages are Bookodile's, and can be corrected by hand.
• Clearing a number field saves a zero, not "unlimited". This matters most for how far ahead and for slot spacing.
• Reminders go by email; by SMS as well only with the SMS messages add-on on a paid plan, to a customer whose number is in one of the 14 countries SMS reach (Czech numbers not yet) — see SMS messages. A demo workspace never texts.
• Minimum notice and how far ahead bind customers only. A team member moving a visit is offered times on your slot spacing and can choose any other.