Appointments setup and calendar sync
Connect Google Calendar or Outlook and your busy times stay free. Each service now has its own breaks, notice, questions and approval, and a checklist shows what’s missing before booking opens.
What changed
Booking in Askenly used to be one set of opening hours and one list of services. That works for a simple diary, but most businesses that take appointments have more rules than that. A colour treatment needs a cleanup break afterwards. A discovery call should never be booked for ten minutes from now. A first consultation might need your approval before it counts. And the hardest part of all: your real diary lives somewhere else, in Google Calendar or Outlook, and a booking page that can't see it will happily offer a time when you are at the dentist.
This release fixes all of that. There are three parts, and you can use any of them on their own:
- A setup checklist that shows exactly what is missing before your booking page opens, and explains why any time is or isn't offered.
- Service rules, so each service carries its own breaks, notice, booking window, questions, approval and change policy.
- Calendar sync with Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook, so your busy times are never offered to customers and every booking lands in your calendar.
Everything below is live in the Appointments page today, on every plan, Free included. Booking stays free for you and for your customers: there are no prices, payments or booking fees anywhere in it.
The setup checklist
Appointments now has a setup checklist that shows whether customers can book online right now, and if not, what to do next. It asks the same questions your public booking page asks before it shows a single time, so the two can never disagree. If the checklist says you are ready, your page is open. If something is missing, the checklist names it in plain words.
The checklist looks for the things a booking page cannot work without:
- An active service, with a length.
- Weekly hours on at least one day.
- Open times customers can see. Your hours, notice and booking window must leave at least one time free.
- A confirmed time zone, so customers in another country see the right times.
- Online booking switched on. If you paused it, the checklist reminds you.
Once every item is ticked, your booking link is ready to share in your bio, your Stories, your DMs or anywhere else.
The checklist, the Booking setup panel and your public booking page all use the same rules. If one says a time is free, they all do.
Services now carry their own rules
Every service you offer is different, so every service now has its own settings. You find them by opening a service in Appointments. Each one is optional, and a service with none of them set works exactly as before.
Breaks before and after
Add a break before a service, after it, or both. The break is kept free automatically, so a 60-minute haircut with a 15-minute break after it blocks 75 minutes of your day, but the customer still sees a 60-minute appointment. Breaks are useful for cleanup, travel between home visits, writing up notes after a session or simply catching your breath.
Notice
Notice is the shortest time between booking and the appointment. With 24 hours' notice, nobody can book you for this afternoon. With 2 hours, you get a little warning before a walk-in style booking. Times inside the notice period simply aren't offered.
Booking window
The booking window is how far ahead people can book. A trainer who plans a month at a time might set 30 days. A salon that publishes rotas a fortnight ahead might set 14. Times beyond the window aren't offered until the window moves forward.
Questions for your customer
Ask the things you need to know before the appointment: their hair length, what they want to cover on the call, their order number, whether it is their first visit. Questions can be required or optional and are asked only on your booking page. Answers are saved with the booking, so they are right there when you open it.
Confirmation instructions
Write what the customer should know once they are booked: where to park, which entrance to use, what to bring, the meeting link. These instructions are added to the confirmation email, so the details arrive at the moment they are most useful.
Require approval
Turn on approval when you want to look at a booking before it counts. A booking that needs approval is saved as Tentative. The time is held, but the customer gets no confirmation email until you confirm it. When you confirm, the normal emails go out; if you decline, the time opens again. This is handy for first consultations, larger jobs and anything where you want to check fit first.
Reschedule and cancel
Decide whether customers can reschedule or cancel a booking themselves from the link in their confirmation. You can allow both, either or neither. When they can't, the booking page tells them to get in touch with you instead.
Cancellation policy
Write your cancellation policy in your own words, for example "Please give us 24 hours' notice if you can't make it." It is shown to customers when they book, so nobody is surprised later.
A daily limit
Some days you can take ten appointments in theory but only want to take four. Availability now has an optional maximum bookings per day. When a day reaches it, the rest of that day is no longer offered, even if there are gaps in your hours. Leave it empty for no limit.
Calendar sync with Google and Outlook
This is the biggest part of the release. You can now connect a calendar from the Availability panel in Appointments, and Askenly works with it in two directions.
Your busy times are kept free
Once connected, Askenly reads when you are busy in your calendar and never offers those times to customers. Lunch with a friend, a school run, a holiday: if it is in your calendar as busy, it isn't on your booking page. This applies everywhere times are offered, on your booking page, inside Instagram DMs and when you or an assistant look for open slots.
Askenly only needs to know that you are busy, not what the event is. Events that Askenly created for your own bookings are recognised and not counted twice.
Every booking lands in your calendar
New bookings are added to your calendar as events, with the service, the customer's name and the time. When a booking is rescheduled, the event moves. When it is cancelled, the event is removed. You don't have to copy anything across by hand, and your phone's calendar app shows your day as it really is.
Google Calendar with a bookings spreadsheet
When you connect Google, Askenly also creates a bookings spreadsheet in your Google Drive and keeps it up to date with a row for each booking. It is a simple way to keep a running record, share it with a colleague or build your own reports.
Askenly asks Google only for access to the spreadsheet it creates. It cannot open or read any other file in your Drive.
Microsoft Outlook
If your diary lives in Outlook or Microsoft 365, connect Outlook instead. Busy times are kept free and bookings are added as events, exactly as with Google.
Connecting and disconnecting
Connecting takes a minute: choose Google or Outlook in Availability, sign in with that account and approve access. Only owners and admins of a workspace can connect a calendar. The access is stored encrypted and is never shown in the browser.
You can disconnect at any time from the same place. Booking keeps working afterwards with your opening hours alone; it simply stops checking your calendar and stops adding events to it.
If your calendar can't be reached for a moment, booking stays open using your opening hours, so an outage at Google or Microsoft never closes your booking page.
Booking links for each service
Every service now has its own booking link as well as your main one. Your main link lets people choose any service. A service link skips that step and goes straight to its times, which is ideal for a Story about one treatment or a DM about one kind of call. The page shows a short "Step x of y" so people know how far they have to go.
Each link counts its views, and Your appointments shows them next to who booked, so you can see which links people open and which turn into bookings.
Booking inside Instagram DMs
The same rules apply when people book without leaving Instagram. When a Book automation runs, Askenly offers your next three open times in the chat, and the person replies 1, 2 or 3 to book. They can also ask in their own words, such as "Tuesday afternoon" or "more times", and get times that fit. Breaks, notice, the booking window, daily limits and your calendar are all respected, so a DM never offers a time your booking page wouldn't.
The emails your customers receive
Confirmation and reminder emails go out automatically, and this release gives you more control over them:
- Confirmation includes the service's confirmation instructions and your cancellation policy.
- Follow-up after a completed appointment is an optional email you can switch on, for a thank-you, a review request or a rebooking nudge.
- No-show email is optional too, for when someone misses their appointment.
- Every customer email can be turned off individually, and the setting is checked at the moment of sending, so switching one off takes effect straight away.
When you open a booking, you now see the emails that booking really received, and the ones still waiting to go out. If a customer says they never got their confirmation, you can check and send it again from the same screen.
Test mode, so you can try it safely
The preview in Appointments is a test mode. You can book yourself in, try the questions, check the times and see what your customer will see. Test bookings are clearly marked, stay in your browser and are never uploaded, emailed, added to your calendar or counted in your numbers. Try it as often as you like before you share your link.
Export your bookings
Export downloads your bookings as a spreadsheet file, filtered to what you are looking at. Contact details are left out unless you ask for them, so you can share a schedule without sharing anyone's email or phone number by accident.
How to get started
If you already take bookings with Askenly, nothing changes until you change it. Your services keep working exactly as before, and every new rule starts switched off. To get the most from this release:
- Open Appointments and work through the setup checklist until every item is ticked.
- Open each service and add the rules that matter: a break, notice, a booking window, a question or two.
- In Availability, connect Google Calendar or Outlook so your busy times stay free.
- Use the test mode to book yourself in and check the confirmation email.
- Share your main booking link, or a service link, in your bio, Stories and DMs.
If anything doesn't look right, open a ticket from Help in the app. A person on our team will look at your setup with you, and we aim to reply within 8 hours.
