Appointments and the booking page — Help

Not every conversation with a client is a full booking. Before the event there is the site visit, the menu tasting, the tour, the consultation call. Appointments are 1pm's light way to handle those: put one on the calendar yourself in a few seconds, or hand clients a link and let them pick a time that suits both of you. They sit alongside your events without ever getting tangled up in them.

The key thing to understand up front is that an appointment is not an event. It carries no BEO, no run of show, no pricing, and it never blocks your diary the way a real booking does. A tasting pencilled in for Tuesday will not stop you confirming a wedding in the same room that night. Appointments are the lighter layer that lives on top.

Adding an appointment yourself

The quickest way is straight from the calendar. Turn on Add appointment in the calendar legend, then click the day (or the time slot) you want. The appointment form opens with the date and time already filled in.

Fill in as much or as little as you like:

Title. What the appointment is for, for example "Menu tasting" or "Site visit".
Space. Which room or area it is at. If you only have one Space it is chosen for you.
Type. An optional label like Tasting, Tour, or Consultation. 1pm remembers the ones you use and offers them back as you type, so your labels stay consistent.
Date, start and end. The end time defaults to thirty minutes after the start, which you can change.
Contact. Link it to a client or prospect from your address book. Optional, but it is what lets 1pm email them a confirmation.
Notes. Anything you want to remember about the appointment.

Tick Email a confirmation and calendar invite to the contact to send the client a tidy confirmation with an add-to-calendar file attached. That option is only available when the contact you picked has an email address on file.

Appointments show on the calendar as their own kind of entry, styled differently to your events and with their own legend toggle, so a busy month never confuses a tasting with a booking.

Phone or video

Every appointment is either in person, on the phone, or over video. When you offer video (see the Space settings below), the form gives you a Video link field to paste a meeting URL into.

You do not have to leave 1pm to make one. Under the field are three shortcuts that open a fresh meeting in a new tab:

Google Meet opens a new Meet.
Zoom opens Zoom's schedule-a-meeting page.
Teams opens a new Teams meeting.

These are handy deep links, not integrations, so there is nothing to connect and no permissions to grant. Create the meeting in whichever tool you use, copy the link it gives you, and paste it back into the Video link field. Once a link is saved, a Join video call button appears on the appointment and on its calendar chip, so you are one tap from the call on the day.

The confirmation email

When you send a confirmation (or a client books themselves), 1pm emails them a clean note: the title, the date and time, the Space, and a calendar file (.ics) they can add to Google, Outlook, or Apple Calendar in one tap. If the appointment has a video link, the email carries a Join the video call button.

The email reads as coming from your venue's name, and replies go to your own address, so to the client it feels like a note from you, not from software.

Letting clients book themselves

Rather than trading emails to find a time, you can publish a booking page for a Space and let clients pick from the slots you are happy to offer. This is opt-in per Space and off until you turn it on.

Open the Space (under Spaces) and find the Appointments panel:

Turn on bookings with the master toggle. Nothing is public until you do.
Appointment length sets how long each slot is: 15, 30, 45, 60, 90, or 120 minutes.
Offer video appointments lets clients choose a video call instead of coming in.
Availability windows are the times you are open to appointments, set as a simple weekly grid. Add a window per day, for example Tuesday 10:00 to 16:00 and Thursday 13:00 to 17:00. 1pm slices each window into slots of the length you chose.

That weekly grid is deliberately plain. It is not a recurrence engine: it is the shape of a normal week, and 1pm handles the rest, only ever offering a slot that is genuinely free.

Your public booking page

Turning bookings on gives the Space a booking link ending in /book/. Copy it from the Appointments panel and share it however you like: in an email, on your website, in your email signature.

The page works like the scheduling tools clients already know. They see:

A month calendar with only the days that have free slots selectable, so there is no way to pick a time you are not open.
The times for the day they choose.
Phone or video, when you offer video, as a required choice ("How would you like to meet?").
Their name and email, plus an optional phone number and a note.

When they pick a slot and submit, 1pm books it, creates or links their contact record, and shows a "You're booked in" screen. If two people try for the same slot at once, only one gets it: the other is told the time just went and asked to pick another. The page is protected against spam and abuse, so the link is safe to put anywhere public.

Video bookings and the held confirmation

A phone or in-person booking is confirmed straight away. A video booking is slightly different, because the meeting link usually does not exist yet when the client books.

So 1pm holds the client's confirmation. Instead of sending a bare "you're booked" email with no way to join, it waits. The booking lands on your calendar flagged as needing a link, and you get a notification. Open the appointment, paste in a meeting link (or use one of the Meet, Zoom, or Teams shortcuts), and save. That single confirmation then goes to the client with the join link inside. They get one clear email, not two confusing ones.

Branding the booking page

The booking page wears your colours. Your logo sits at the top, and your brand accent colour tints the selected date, the chosen time, and the book button. With nothing set it falls back to 1pm's default, but a couple of minutes on your branding makes the page feel like part of your own site rather than a generic form.

Embedding it on your website

If you would rather the booking page live inside your own site than behind a link, the Appointments panel also gives you a Copy embed code button. Paste that snippet into any web page and the booking page appears inline, sized to fit. It works the same way as the enquiry form embed: a small block of code, no technical setup.

Booking a chat from a quote or confirmation

A client reading your quote often has one question standing between them and accepting it. Rather than pasting your booking link into every covering email, you can have 1pm put a booking button on the documents themselves: quotes, invoices, confirmations, and proposals.

Turn it on in Account, then Tax & invoicing, under Client bookings: tick Let clients book a chat from a document. It is off by default, deliberately, because switching it on adds a button to documents already sitting in clients' inboxes.

A few things worth knowing about how it behaves:

The button reads whatever your booking page heading says, so the client sees the same words on the button as on the page it opens.
It points at the Space the document is about. If that Space is not taking bookings, 1pm falls back to your only bookable Space, then to your default Space. If you have several bookable Spaces and none of them relates to the document, no button appears at all: pointing a client at a room they were never quoted for is worse than no button, and you can always paste the right link into the covering email.
Their name and email are prefilled from the document, so booking is a couple of taps rather than a form.
It sits in the top row beside Download PDF, out of the way of the accept, sign, and pay steps, and it never appears on the printed copy or the PDF.

Nothing shows until at least one Space is taking bookings, and the setting says so if none is yet.

Where appointments show up, and what you are told

Everything lands in two places you already watch:

The calendar, as appointment chips you can toggle on or off independently of your events.
The bell, when a client books themselves. You get a "New appointment" notification, and for a video booking a second nudge to add the meeting link.

Appointments you create by hand do not fire notifications, since you already know about them.

Reminding people before the appointment

To cut no-shows, you can have 1pm email a reminder a set time before each appointment: to the client who booked, to the Space contact, or both. This is set up once as an automation rather than per appointment. Pick the X minutes before an appointment trigger, choose how far ahead it goes (say a day, or a couple of hours), and write the reminder. It then runs for every booked appointment automatically. Because it needs to know exactly when each appointment starts, it only works once you have set your calendar time zone.

A few things worth knowing

Appointments never block your events. They hold their slot against other appointments, so two clients cannot book the same tasting time, and an event that occupies the room will close appointment slots there. But an appointment itself will never stop you booking a real event, on the calendar or anywhere else. If you are working out event clashes, that is a separate feature: see preventing a double-booked Space.
Times are your venue's local time. 1pm shows and books slots in the time the venue runs on, and does not convert to the client's time zone. For local, in-person appointments that is exactly what you want. For a video call with someone in another city, it is worth confirming the time zone in your note.
There are sensible limits. Clients can book a set number of days ahead (about two months by default), you can hold slots back with a lead time so nobody books the next ten minutes, and the page caps how far out it looks so it always stays quick.
Turning bookings off stops the link working immediately. Existing appointments already on your calendar stay put.