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 live at Settings → Booking page, they apply to the whole business rather than per service or per person, and there are seventeen of them.

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 set an exact start, to the minute, and sees what it clashes with 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 themselves from the link in their confirmation email and the slot frees immediately. Inside it, the cancel button is replaced by a line telling them to contact you.

It is one number for the whole business — not per service, not per person.

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.

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.

What customers must enter

Name is always required and cannot be switched off.

require_email, default on, and require_phone, default on. Each is independent, but the settings screen will not let you turn both off, because you need some way to reach the customer.

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.

gdpr_text replaces the default sentence beside that checkbox with your own wording. It is a single piece of text, not one per language — whatever you type is shown to every customer, whichever language they are reading the rest of the page in.

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

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.

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 needs the customer to have an email address, and it is skipped entirely while all customer emails 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.

Despite the helper text, it appears in the confirmation only — not in reminders and not in cancellations. Email templates cannot otherwise be edited.

Being found in search

search_indexable, on unless you turn it off. 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. Your page keeps working and anyone with the link can still book.

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.

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 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 a single string, not one per language.
• Clearing a number field saves a zero, not "unlimited". This matters most for how far ahead and for slot spacing.
• Text-message reminders are not switched on, whatever the phone field's description suggests. Everything reaches customers by email.
• 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.