Set up your account and take your first booking

1. What happens right after you sign up

Signing up starts a short, three-step wizard, not a long form: Bookings, Find your business, Confirm details. Everything in it can be changed later too.

• How people book with you: Appointments (a client books one service with one team member for a set duration) or Table reservations (a guest books a table for a party size inside a service period, like lunch or dinner).
• Your country, which narrows the business search on the next step and decides which states or regions you can choose from. Then, optionally, look up your business on Google: pick it from the results and your name, address, phone number and opening hours get filled in for you. You can skip the search and type everything in yourself instead.
• A last check of the details before you finish: your business name, the web address customers will book you at, your industry, your address, your phone number, and your opening hours.

Once you confirm, you land straight on your dashboard, not on a checklist. Setup is a separate screen you open yourself, which is what the rest of this article is about.

2. Find your Setup checklist

Open Settings in the sidebar: Setup is the first row, under Getting started. While the checklist is unfinished, the bar across the top of your dashboard also shows how far along you are, with a Finish setup link that goes straight to it.

It behaves like a checklist rather than a form. You don't tick anything off by hand: finishing something anywhere else in the dashboard, like adding a service or uploading a logo, automatically shows up here as done the next time you look.

3. What's on the checklist

The steps are grouped into three sections: Start taking bookings, Your brand and details, and Team and payments. A few steps differ depending on whether you're an Appointments business or a Table reservations business, since the two work differently under the hood.

• Start taking bookings: for Appointments businesses this is Add your services and prices, then Set your opening hours, then Make your booking page live. For Table reservations businesses it's Set up your floor plan (adding your tables), then Set your service periods, then the same Make your booking page live.
• Your brand and details: Add your logo and Add your contact details, for every business. Appointments businesses get one extra step here, Create your website, which builds a full website for your business with booking already built in.
• Team and payments: Appointments businesses see Add your team, so customers can choose who they book with. Table reservations has no bookable team-member concept, so this step doesn't apply there. Every business sees Take deposits and card payments, to protect your time from no-shows.

4. The two steps you can skip

Two steps have a smaller link next to the main button, for businesses that genuinely will never do that step rather than just haven't gotten to it yet.

• "I work solo", next to Add your team: for a one-person business where a second team member is never coming. Clicking it also turns off the team picker your customers would otherwise see when they book.
• "I take payment in person", next to Take deposits and card payments: for a business that only ever takes cash or card in person and doesn't need online payment collection.

5. Turn your booking page on, then try it yourself

New accounts start switched on, so most people find this step already ticked off. If it isn't, or you're not sure, open Settings in the sidebar, then Business, set the Status field on the Business Details card to Active, and click Save Changes. Setting it to Inactive hides your public booking page entirely, so only turn it off on purpose.

Before customers start finding you, take a booking yourself. At the top of the Setup screen there are two buttons: Booking Page opens your public booking widget in a new tab, and Website (Appointments businesses only) opens your full site. Go through the whole flow as a customer would, right up to the confirmation.