Five ways to run a booking-driven business

Appointments: a slot with a person

The most common shape. The customer books a slot with the person who will carry it out — a treatment, a haircut, a visit. The scarce thing is that person's time.

• The booking takes the person's time straight away — nobody can be double-booked
• The confirmation goes out at once, the reminder the day before
• Whoever takes the customer sees earlier visits and notes before they arrive
• The treatment is waiting as a finished order in the checkout when it's time to pay

Classes: a place in something already scheduled

Here the customer isn't booking a person but a place — in a group class, a course, a term or on a court. The scarce thing is capacity.

• The place comes off the capacity immediately, and full means full
• The waitlist fills a place that's cancelled, without anyone ringing round
• The instructor sees the participant list on their phone — no printout in the staff room
• Equipment can be attached to the same booking and blocked for that time

Meetings: in person or on a link

Advice, consultations and follow-ups. The customer chooses when booking, and the right details travel with the confirmation — the address or the link.

• Connect your Microsoft or Google calendar and the meeting link is created automatically, in Teams or Google Meet
• The link travels with the confirmation — nobody sends calendar invitations by hand
• Earlier meetings and notes sit with the booking, not in an email thread
• The meeting is an order when you're done — take payment there and then, or invoice

Jobs and work orders: the customer's part and yours

Workshops and servicing work differently, because the booking is only the beginning. Something is dropped off, work is carried out and something is collected. The customer has their part of the job — describing the fault, turning up, collecting — and you have yours.

The work order is where the two parts meet. It holds what the customer said, what you found, what was done and what it cost — and it follows the booking all the way to the receipt.

• Booking the drop-off books both the time and the person who will do the work
• The work order carries the fault description, so the customer doesn't explain it twice
• The job and the parts sit as lines; the order becomes the receipt at collection
• The customer is told when it's ready instead of ringing to ask

Hire: by the hour, the day or the period

Here the scarce resource isn't a person but the thing — the machine, the boat, the premises, the trailer. The booking has two ends: the hand-out and the return.

• The resource is blocked in the calendar, with a buffer for resetting it if you want one
• Hand-out and return are signed off in the app — you see what's out and what's late
• The deposit stays put until the return has been signed off
• The rental agreement belongs to the resource and follows every hire

The two calendars

What lets the shapes live in one platform is that Bellebook has two calendars, not one. The staff calendar is each person's day. The resource calendar is the things: rooms, chairs, machines, courts, vehicles.

If a booking needs both a person and a place, both are taken in the same booking. At the same time. Double booking isn't possible, because the resource exists only once.

The difference from entering the rooms as pretend staff in a single calendar is that resources have rules of their own. A resource may need a buffer between bookings, it can be hired out on its own, and it can carry its own contract with a warranty and a response time.

• The salon that rents out chairs: the chair is a resource, the haircut a slot with a person
• The workshop with two ramps: the ramps limit the day as much as the mechanic does
• The clinic with treatment rooms: the room is booked together with the practitioner
• The hire company with equipment: the equipment is, in effect, the whole booking

The same booking sets everything in motion

Whichever shape you use, it is a single event that starts the chain, and everything below follows from it.

Most businesses use more than one shape, and that is often where the growth is. A clinic that starts running courses. A workshop that hires out trailers. A padel centre that sells coaching alongside the courts. None of it needs a new system — just a different shape of booking.

That is why we call it a platform and not a toolbox. You choose the shape to fit how you actually work, not the other way round.

• The checkout has the order ready when the customer pays
• Staff hours become timesheets and payroll records without being retyped
• The receipt becomes the day close and the accounting records — the SIE file goes to your accounting software, while bank feeds, the VAT return and the annual accounts stay where they are
• Belle reads all of it and suggests the next step — you approve