An appointment booking system that cannot double-book your day.
Customers pick a time, pay at the point of booking and get a confirmation and a reminder, without a phone call. Built around the way your diary works, owned by you, and linked from your social media.
The one thing it cannot get wrong
One person, one hour, one booking.
In an appointment business the diary is the product. A stylist, therapist or instructor can only be in one place at a time, so a double-booked hour is not a small admin slip. It is a customer in reception being asked to come back another day.
The way we build it, the rule that stops two bookings taking the same hour lives in the database, so two people tapping the same slot at the same moment cannot both get it. Availability is worked out live on the server, not cached and hoped for.
What breaks when it gets busy
Three places it usually goes wrong.
- 01
Bookings by message
Appointments arrive as texts and direct messages at all hours, and each one has to be read, checked against the diary and answered. The evening goes on confirming.
- 02
The no-show with nothing paid
The hour was held on a promise. When they do not turn up the chair sat empty and there was nothing in it. Taking payment at the point of booking changes who carries that cost.
- 03
Changes by phone call
Every reschedule is a call or a chain of messages, and the diary is only as right as the last time someone remembered to update it.
The proof
A client, in her own words.
The proof here is a client review, not a case study with figures. A hair salon in Swindon had a booking system built by Archline and described the result in a public Google review. The mechanism we build on, live availability, payment at booking and the rule that stops a double booking, is proven on ShotBot, our own equipment hire product. ShotBot is not an appointments business.
They not only built a brilliant, easy-to-use system but also incorporated it seamlessly across all of my social media platforms, which has made such a huge difference for my clients and my business. The whole process was so smooth from start to finish. Google review, Swindon. More from Swindon
What the build includes
The Order build: From £3,500.
Everything in Attention, plus customers booking or ordering and paying for themselves, without ever double-booking you. Typically 4 to 8 weeks. Monthly retainer £249. Fixed price, 50% to start and 50% on delivery.
- Up to 8 pages, with booking and service pages included
- Real-time availability, calculated server-side rather than cached and hoped for
- Double-booking prevented by a database constraint, not application logic: impossible, not unlikely
- Payment captured at the point of booking through Stripe, so the slot is paid for before anyone turns up
- Automated transactional email: confirmations, reminders, cancellations
- Admin dashboard: bookings, customers, revenue, exports
- Cancellation, rescheduling and refund handling, without a phone call
- Online ordering and recurring subscriptions, with delivery priced by postcode
- Basic follow-up for enquiries that don’t convert
- Business listings set up and submitted for verification: Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect and Bing Places
Every price is published on the services page. Most projects start with the £450 Diagnostic, credited in full against a build within 30 days.
Rent or build
Renting is sometimes the right answer.
A rented booking tool is often the right answer for an appointment business, especially a sole trader with a simple diary: it is cheap to start and someone else keeps it running. What changes as you grow is what it charges and what you own at the end of it, which is nothing. A build costs more at the start and makes sense when your services, payments or channels do not fit a standard tool. The costs page sets out both.
What a booking system costs: renting or building
Also built for equipment hire, gyms and classes, trades and jobs. Local to Wiltshire, Bath and Bristol.
Questions
Four questions, answered directly.
How much does an appointment booking system cost?
Do customers pay when they book an appointment?
Does it send reminders and handle cancellations?
Can people book from my social media?
→Start
Tell us what breaks when you get busy.
The first step is a call, and it costs nothing: twenty minutes on what your business does and what breaks when you get busy. Most projects then start with the £450 Diagnostic: half a day walking your process end to end, with a written recommendation and a fixed quote, credited in full against a build if you go ahead within thirty days. If you already know which package you need and its scope is clear, we quote it directly.