Online Appointment Booking Setup: 7 Steps to First Invoice

Write three lists on paper before you open the system. Ten minutes here saves you an hour later:

• Your services: every service you offer, with its name, its approximate duration and its price (dental check-up — 30 minutes — SAR 150).

• Your resources: who or what is being booked? People (doctors, specialists, consultants) and places or equipment (rooms, chairs, lifts).

• Your working hours: each resource's shift, its breaks, and your closing days.

You also need a Snad account with the Bookings app enabled. It is available on every plan, counted against your plan's app allowance, and the trial is 30 days free.

Enter your first list of services: the name, the duration, the price, and the resources able to deliver it. Duration is the backbone of scheduling. The system uses it to calculate available slots automatically, so a 10:00 appointment for a 45-minute service blocks that resource until 10:45 with no manual arithmetic.

Two tips. Start with your ten most requested services rather than the full catalogue — adding the rest later is one click. And be realistic about durations: build in a turnaround buffer where you need one (sterilising the room, resetting the chair) so appointments do not run back-to-back with no room to breathe.

Add every resource — a person, a place or a piece of equipment — and set its weekly schedule: working days, hours and breaks. The schedule is what blocks bookings outside your real operating hours without any intervention from you.

Then set exceptions as they come up: the doctor is on leave next Tuesday, lift one goes in for maintenance at the end of the month. A single exception closes bookings on that resource for the period you specify, while every other resource stays available. That way the calendar reflects how your business actually runs, not an idealised version of it.

Choose your activity template from 18 ready-made templates across five groups: medical and health (clinics, dental, veterinary, physiotherapy, nutrition), beauty and grooming (salons, spas, men's barbers), maintenance and services (workshops, car washes, home services, appliance repair), education and sport (private tutoring, fitness, driving schools), and professional services (consulting, photography, real estate). The labels change across every screen immediately.

Is your line of business outside the eighteen templates? Rename the labels freely — any other appointment-based business can be configured with its own terms and fields in minutes. Then add the custom fields your business needs on every booking: the plate number for a workshop, the subject of the consultation for a professional office. The detail differs by sector, and clinics, beauty salons, car maintenance workshops and professional offices each end up with their own field set.

Enable the public booking page from the app settings: upload your logo, choose which services are open to self-booking (you can keep some services internal, bookable by reception only), and review the page preview exactly as your customer will see it.

Two decisions to make here:

• Pre-approval: does the customer's booking confirm instantly, or stay pending until your team approves it? Pre-approval suits professional offices; instant confirmation suits salons and workshops.

• Branding: on the Pro plan you can remove the Snad logo from the page, so it carries your business identity alone.

A page with no visitors books nothing. From the page settings, download the print-quality QR code and put it where your customers look: the reception desk, the shopfront window, business cards and printed invoices.

Then publish the link across your digital channels: the bio on your social accounts, the auto-reply on WhatsApp Business, and your Google Maps profile. The rule is simple. Anywhere a customer asks you "when can I book?", put the link that answers for you.

Enable automatic reminders in the settings. They are the heart of cutting no-shows: a confirmation message reaches the customer by email and WhatsApp the moment they book, with a ready calendar invite attached; a reminder follows one day before the appointment; a final one lands two hours before. Every one of them asks the customer to confirm attendance with one tap.

Set the confirmation window and the release behaviour alongside them. An appointment that is not confirmed within its window is released automatically and offered to the waiting list. The sequence is deliberate — each message catches a different kind of forgetting — and a stricter no-show policy is only worth considering once these reminders are already running.

Close the full loop with a real run-through. Create a test booking (or wait for your first real one) and update its status from the day sheet — arrived, then completed. Then issue the invoice from the booking itself: an electronic invoice compliant with the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority, carrying the customer, the service and the amount, with nothing re-entered. You can also set issuance to run automatically on every completion.

Then watch your books: the revenue posts to accounting the moment the invoice is issued. That moment — an approved invoice and a journal entry produced by an appointment booked online — is the difference between a complete booking system and a digitised appointment diary. Congratulations: your business now takes bookings and issues their invoices with nothing in between.