SMS messages — confirmations, reminders and your own messages by SMS

SMS messages is an add-on that sends your customers an SMS as well as an email: the confirmation of an online booking, the reminder, a change or cancellation you make, a waiting-list offer, and messages your team writes in Messages. Like every add-on it is free to switch on. SMS need a paid plan: each SMS is billed monthly with your plan, on the same invoice, at a price per country, never more a month than your cap.

Emails are never affected. An SMS that does not go — switched off, no plan, the cap reached, a limit — leaves the email exactly as it was, and never stops a booking.

Switching it on

Settings → SMS messages, one switch per branch: a quiet branch can stay on email while a busy one sends SMS. It is off for every branch until you switch it on, and it starts with all five kinds of SMS on.

Not yet in Czechia

SMS are coming soon for businesses in Czechia: a branch there shows the add-on as coming soon and has no switch. Its customers get every email as before.

SMS need a paid plan

SMS are the one part of Bookodile that needs a paid plan. Each SMS costs money to send, and it is billed after it is sent — on your plan's monthly invoice — so it needs a plan with an invoice and a card.

• On a paid plan, SMS go out as you set them.
• In your 14-day trial, SMS go out once a card is saved; they are billed on your first invoice.
• On the free plan, or while a payment has failed, nothing is sent. You can still switch the add-on on and set everything; the page says why nothing goes out, and every switch that is on reads Not sending.

Which SMS go out

Each is a switch on the add-on's page, per branch. Emails always go; these go by SMS too, to customers with a phone number.

• Booking confirmations — when a customer books online. A booking your team makes sends none: that customer was just told in person or on the phone.
• Reminders — at the time set in Booking settings: the day before at 08:00 in your time zone, two hours before, or both.
• Changes & cancellations — when your team moves or cancels a booking and the customer is told. A visit moved or cancelled together is one SMS. A customer who cancels themselves gets none — they just did it.
• Waiting list — when you offer someone a freed time.
• Messages — lets your team choose SMS in Messages.

What the customer receives

Every automatic SMS is the same shape: your branch's name, then fixed words with the date and time, and a link.

Sharp & Co.: Booking confirmed for 2 Oct at 14:30. Details or cancel: bookodile.com/m/x7Kp2QaZ9d

• Always one SMS. No service name and no customer name — both are typed by people and could be any length. The wording is fixed and cannot be edited.
• Written without accents, in every language. One accented letter shrinks an SMS from 160 characters to 70, and none of these would fit. Your branch's name is written without accents in the SMS too.
• In your customers' language — the language of your booking page, set in Settings → Business profile → Language — never the language your team reads the dashboard in. The add-on's page names it.
• The sender is Bookodile. Each SMS starts with your branch's name, which is how the customer knows who wrote.

The link opens:

After that the link opens a page with your business's name and your booking page, and nothing else.

What an SMS costs

An SMS is billed per part, at a price that depends on the country of the number. Automatic SMS are always one part; a long message from Messages can be several — the composer shows how many before you send.

The price of one part for your branch's country is on Settings → SMS messages. Prices follow what the networks charge in each country, so a part to a Vietnamese number costs several times one to a Slovak number.

SMS go only to numbers in a country with a price: Slovakia, Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Vietnam. A number anywhere else — Czech numbers included, for now — gets the email only.

How SMS are billed

SMS are billed monthly with your plan, on the same invoice, as one line for all the SMS of the billing period, at their exact prices. Nothing is paid in advance and there is nothing to top up. An SMS the network refuses is never billed.

Settings → Billing shows this billing period's SMS and earlier months; Settings → SMS messages shows the same beside the cap.

The monthly SMS cap

SMS stop for the rest of the billing period when they reach your cap, and your customers get emails only until the next period starts.

• The cap is what your plan costs a month, so it grows with your plan.
• Settings → SMS messages says whether it is enough. It shows how many SMS your cap covers at your country's price, and replays your last 30 days with the SMS you have switched on — how many that would have been, what they would have cost, and whether that fits your cap or what cap would. Switch an SMS off and the estimate moves at once. A booking with a phone number usually means a confirmation (when it was booked online) and a reminder — two with a reminder the day before and on the day. Messages you write yourself are not counted.
• You can raise it, up to three times your plan price, in Settings → SMS messages — never lower than the plan price. Only the workspace owner and people whose role has Manage billing can change it.
• At 80% of the cap the owner gets one email, the bell shows it to the team, and a yellow card appears at the top of the sidebar for people who manage billing. When the cap is reached, the same again, with a red card. Each once per billing period.
• A message that did not go by SMS says so in the conversation — "SMS not delivered", with the reason: a phone number that is not a real number, a country SMS cannot reach, a customer who stopped SMS, the cap reached, or no paid plan. Fix what it names and send again.

A worked example: a hair salon's SMS cap is its plan price, which covers a few hundred SMS a month to local numbers. A gym on the same plan that sends a reminder the day before and two hours before every class doubles its cap for a busy month; a physiotherapy practice that only sends confirmations never comes near it.

Limits that stop misuse

Fixed rules, the same for everyone, with nothing to set:

• One number: at most 3 SMS a day from your business, and 10 a day from all businesses on Bookodile.
• Confirmations of online bookings: at most 20 an hour per branch — or 4 for each team member who takes bookings, if that is more. Above it, confirmations go by email only. This is the only SMS a stranger can make you send, so it is the only one capped by the hour.
• Reminders, changes, cancellations, waiting-list offers and messages are never capped by the hour — a full day of reminders goes out at 08:00 however many there are.
• Messages: 30 messages an hour per person, 100 SMS a day per branch, 6 parts per message.

A limit stops an SMS, never a booking and never an email.

Every setting

Worked example

A barbershop with ten barbers has 110 bookings tomorrow. At 08:00 every one of those customers gets a reminder by email and one SMS — all 110 go, none held back. A customer who booked online an hour ago got a one-SMS confirmation with a link to cancel if they must.

A physiotherapy clinic in Košice has a Slovak booking page, so its SMS read in Slovak — without accents, so each stays one SMS. It switches off Waiting list SMS, because it calls those patients anyway, and keeps the rest.

Limits

• Not yet in Czechia — neither for a branch there nor to a Czech number.
• SMS are one-way. A customer answers on a linked page, never by replying.
• The wording is fixed. You cannot edit the automatic SMS or add a service name to them.
• The sender is Bookodile, not your business's name.
• No bulk SMS campaigns. SMS go to one customer at a time.
• No SMS for bookings your team makes.
• SMS need a paid plan — the one feature that does.
• The cap cannot go below your plan price, or above three times it.
• No SMS to North America yet.
• Demo workspaces never send SMS. Anyone can type any number into a demo.