Bookings and appointments
Online booking software
Bookings come in at night, on Sundays and while you’re working — and they come to your website, not to a portal that then sells your own customers back to you. Calendar, real availability, automatic confirmations. A fourteen-day trial.
What online booking software does
It shows your clients only the times when you can actually see them, takes the booking at any hour of the day, confirms it by email and writes it into your calendar — where nobody else can take the same slot. In return, it takes away the phone that rings at the worst possible moment.
Put like that, it sounds like a contact form. The difference lies entirely in that one word, actually: a contact form collects a request and leaves you the work of checking whether that time is free, replying, and writing it down somewhere. Booking software does the opposite — it decides first that the time is free, then takes it at the very moment it promises it.
The four things it has to do
- Work out availability, rather than asking you every time
- Stop two people taking the same slot
- Confirm straight away, because an unconfirmed booking isn’t a booking
- Keep the history, because a returning client is worth more than a new one
Availability is calculated, not written in by hand
Every service on your price list carries its own duration. If a colour takes ninety minutes, a forty-minute gap will never be offered; if the dining room has twelve tables, the thirteenth group won’t see that time as free. The times shown to the client come from crossing duration, resources and the shifts of whoever is working.
It’s the difference you feel in the second month. A hand-written list of slots — ‘every day 9, 10, 11, 14, 15’ — goes stale the day you change your hours, take on one more person or close on Mondays. From then on the site promises times that don’t exist, and someone turns up when you’re not there.
Two people can’t take the same slot
It sounds obvious, and it’s exactly where almost every home-made system breaks: two clients open the page at the same moment, see the same free time, and press confirm together.
In LyamFlow, confirming the booking and taking the slot happen in the same database transaction: either both succeed or neither does. It isn’t an on-screen check you can get round by reloading the page, and that’s why an overlap can’t happen even in the exact second two people press together.
Confirmations, reminders and no-shows
On confirmation the client gets an email with the day, time and address: it’s proof that the booking exists, and it’s also what cuts the number of people who don’t show. On your side, the client record keeps count of how many times they came and how many times they didn’t.
You don’t beat no-shows with a single rule. You beat them with three things software can give you: instant confirmation, the history in front of whoever answers the phone, and the chance to spot someone who has already cancelled three times before giving them the most sought-after slot of the week.
Where bookings come from
A booking system is little use if it lives in one place only. These are the four doors, and they all lead to the same book.
- The public page An address of your own, with your name and photos on it, to put on Google, in your social media bio and in your auto-replies.
- The widget on your website If you already have a website, the booking form pastes into your pages with a few lines of HTML. You stay on your own turf.
- Il QR Printed on your business card, a flyer or in the window: passers-by book without having to look you up, even when you’re closed.
- The phone Whoever answers enters them by hand and they end up in the same book. There isn’t one diary for the web and another for phone calls.
What happens on its own
In a small business the useful automations are few, and none of them is spectacular: they’re the little jobs nobody ever remembers to do, and that cost half an hour a day when done by hand.
- The confirmation goes out to the client by itself when the booking comes in
- Free times are recalculated with every booking and every cancellation
- The public site shows up-to-date hours and prices without a second edit
- The day closes itself at a time you choose, with its summary saved
Your clients stay yours
Whoever books goes into your own records: contact details, history, how much they spent, whether they turned up. They don’t go into a shared shop window where, just below your name, three competitors pop up three hundred metres away.
It’s the difference between software you give yourself and a portal you sign up to. The first costs a flat subscription and leaves you your clients; the second takes a cut of every booking and treats the clients as its own. That’s no condemnation of portals — they bring in people who don’t know you, and for some it’s worth it — but they’re two different tools, and it pays to know which of the two you’re buying.
What it costs
- 14 days full trial Everything switched on, no credit card. You try it on real bookings, not made-up data.
- CHF 29.90 / month Basic plan One business with its website, bookings included, plus the rest of the system: clients, price list, takings, staff.
- CHF 79.90 / month Pro plan Up to five businesses and five websites from the same account, each with its own bookings.
No fee per booking and no percentage of your takings: what you pay doesn’t depend on how much you work. Amounts are in francs, which is also the currency you’re charged in.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a website already to take bookings?
No. The booking page is a public address that stands on its own and can go anywhere. If you already have a website, you can embed the form in your pages instead; and if you don’t, LyamFlow can build you one for free.
Does it integrate with Google Calendar?
There’s no syncing with external calendars. LyamFlow’s calendar is the system’s own, and it’s also the one that decides availability: keeping two that only half talk to each other is the quickest way to end up with two different truths about the same time slot.
Can I ask for a deposit at the time of booking?
For accommodation, yes, but as an amount: someone booking a room sees ‘deposit on confirmation’, calculated on the percentage you set, and it’s collected outside the site. Automatically charging the deposit to a card at the moment of booking isn’t available today — the online payment is for the bill, which the client settles from a QR code once it’s all done.
Do phone bookings have to be entered twice?
No. Whoever answers enters them once in the system, and from then on they hold the slot for everyone else, exactly like the ones that came in online. There’s only one book.
Does it work for businesses without tables?
Yes: the bookable resource changes with the trade — tables in a restaurant, chairs in a salon, rooms in a B&B, time slots in a practice. The availability calculation is the same; what changes is what gets taken.
How long does it take to get bookings online?
The bulk of it is describing how your business works — hours, services with their duration, available places — and a setup wizard asks for all of it in one go. From signing up to the first online booking usually takes about twenty minutes.
The version for your trade
- Restaurants Restaurant booking system: covers, tables and double bookings.
- Restaurants in Switzerland The Swiss page: francs, Ticino and local habits.
- All the other trades Management software for businesses: salons, practices, gyms, tradespeople, vets.
- I need the website too AI website builder, with booking already built into the page.
Two weeks of real bookings, free
Everything switched on, no credit card. If you don’t need it after fourteen days, you stop — no harm done.