Take bookings

Everything a business needs to sell time is already in RowFold; until recently you had to know it was there. This is the door. From **+ New → Take bookings** you answer four questions — what people book, which table it lands in, who does it, and when you are open — and you come out with a working public page, an hours table you can edit like any other, and a booking that is an ordinary row. This article walks that path end to end: choosing between appointments, classes and nights, setting your hours, booking one yourself to see what a customer sees, going live, and running the day afterwards. Three things you can sell The first question is the one that decides everything after it, so it is worth answering deliberately. A time — an appointment. One person books one slot: a haircut, a consultation, a viewing, a callout. The page offers times and holds one. A seat — a class. Several people book the same session and the page counts places left. Twenty people at one yoga class is twenty rows against one session, and when it fills, the next person joins a waitlist rather than being turned away. A night — a stay. Somebody picks an arrival and a departure and the nights between are held. The day a guest leaves is free that same day, so back-to-back stays sit edge to edge rather than blocking a night nobody is in. You can run all three in one workspace. They are different pages on different tables, because they need different columns and ask visitors different questions — not different products. It reads your table, it does not replace it Point the door at a table and it works out what it can. Which column is the start time, which link is the service, which is the member of staff, which is the customer, how long each service takes, what it costs. Where exactly one column fits a job it binds it; where two could, it leaves the choice to you rather than guessing. If you have no table yet, it builds one, along with the services and staff tables a booking needs to point at. What it never does is invent a second system. A booking is a row in a table you can open, sort, filter, export and automate — on your scheduler because it has a date, in your reports because it is a record. Your hours are rows, not a settings screen Setup seeds a Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five week so that you are never staring at an empty calendar. Nobody works those hours. They are a starting point and the product draws them as an assumption — dashed rather than solid — until you edit them. Hours live in an Availability table as ordinary records, which is the whole reason they are reachable: you can paste a week in from a spreadsheet, change one on your phone, or have an automation close the shop on a bank holiday. The Rota is that table drawn as a week, and it is the fastest way to fix them. A holiday is one row, not fourteen. Give a time-off row a date and an until-date and the whole range closes. Book one yourself before anybody else does The page is created switched off, and that is deliberate: nothing in RowFold publishes a public link on your behalf. While it is off you can still open it, and you should. Book an appointment as a customer would. You will see the times you actually offer, get the confirmation email your customers will get, and end up with a row in your own table. It takes a minute and it is the only way to find out that Tuesday is missing before somebody else does. When you are happy, the same screen has the switch. Going live is the only irreversible-feeling step here, and it is one you take on purpose. Running the day afterwards Once bookings are arriving, the scheduler is the inward-facing half: a column per person, the day laid out, drag to move an appointment, drop it on somebody else to reassign, check people in as they arrive. Moving or cancelling emails the customer, and tells you who it told. For stays the same view becomes a tape chart — a row per unit, a column per day, bars across them — which is the shape you want when the question is "is the cottage free the week after next?". Everything else you already know how to do works unchanged, because these are records: a view filtered to today, a report of bookings by service, an automation that texts a reminder the night before. Taking money A deposit, an instalment ladder or a no-show fee can be attached to a page, and the money goes straight to your own Stripe account — RowFold never holds it. That means connecting Stripe first, from the page's Money card, and it means refunds and disputes stay in your own dashboard where they belong. Until an account is connected the controls are not drawn at all, and a page with no payment set up simply takes bookings without one. Tips • Answer the four questions, then edit the hours. In that order — the hours question is much easier once the page exists and you can see what it offers. • Every setting the door asks about is also on the designer afterwards, and a few more besides. The door is the short path, not a reduced one. • A page that offers nothing tells you which nothing: nobody rostered, no hours typed, everything booked, or a closure. Read the sentence rather than guessing. Good to know • Seeded hours are an assumption, drawn dashed. A page whose rota still says Monday to Friday nine to five is telling your customers something nobody checked. • For stays, the arrival and departure columns must NOT carry a time of day. That is the opposite of an appointment, and the page says so if you get it the wrong way round. • Going live is the switch on the setup screen, not the act of creating the page. Pages are born switched off on purpose. Who can do what • Setting up and publishing a booking page is admin-only — it mints a public link. • Anyone who can see the table can see the bookings on it, because they are ordinary records.