GLEN ELLYN, ILLINOIS
Online booking and payments in Glen Ellyn, IL, for the hours nobody can pick up the phone.
Appointments that write themselves onto the calendar you already keep, messages that go out without you, and money that clears before anyone walks in.
Twenty minutes. You get a written plan and a price. Nothing starts until you say so.
The booking writes itself onto your Google Calendar.
One calendar — the one on your phone, the one you already check. Somebody picks a time on your site and the appointment is sitting there before they've put the phone back in a pocket, with their name, their number and what they booked.
Availability gets read from that same calendar too — so blocking Thursday afternoon for the dentist closes Thursday afternoon to bookings. No double entry, no second app to remember, no let me check and call you back.
Confirmation in seconds. Reminder the day before.
The confirmation goes out immediately, and you can test that claim yourself — book a haircut in our barbershop demo and a real email lands in about ten seconds.
On Growth, the rest of the sequence runs on its own. A reminder the day before carrying the time and the address. A thank-you afterward. A quiet note some months out to the regular who's drifting, timed to how often that customer normally comes back. You wrote none of them and you send every one.
Deposits are how you stop paying for no-shows.
A no-show costs you the slot — and slots are the whole inventory. Nobody has ever sold 2:30 twice.
So the booking page can take a card — a deposit against the appointment, the full amount on an online order, or a payment rung up at the counter for something bought in the shop. All of it lands in one place, attached to the person who paid. The customers who won't put down a deposit are, reliably, the customers who weren't coming.
Booking and payment integration both sit on Growth, $500 a month with a $500 setup.
The notebook stops being the only copy.
Plenty of good businesses run on a spiral notebook by the register and a thread of texts. It holds up until the notebook goes home in somebody's bag, or the phone dies, or you try to answer a plain question. How many times did that customer come in last year. Who hasn't been back since March. What did Saturdays actually take in during July.
Every appointment and every invoice lands in one searchable ledger, and expenses go in the same place. Once a month you get what came in, what went out and who's due back — and it syncs to QuickBooks or whatever your accountant prefers, so the P&L is clean in January instead of reassembled in April.
Downtown wraps around the Metra station at 551 Crescent Blvd, on the Union Pacific West line, 22.4 miles out from Ogilvie. That platform sets the clock for a lot of this village. At seven in the morning people stand there with a coffee and a phone. At six in the evening they're heading home with the errands they thought about all day still undone. Both are hours when your shop is either closed or too busy to answer. A booking page is open at both, and it never puts anybody on hold.
Booking is the front end of a much longer ledger.
'CRM' just names the place your customer information lives, and once the booking feeds it, the rest follows by itself. The appointment becomes an invoice, the invoice becomes a paid record, and the customer who hasn't rebooked in four months turns up on a list without anyone going looking. That's Growth — $500 a month, $500 setup — and it's the same system as the booking rather than a second one bolted alongside.
Questions people actually ask
Straight answers.
Does this work with the calendar I already use?
It runs on Google Calendar, which comes with the Google Workspace email included in your plan. If appointments currently live in a paper book or a phone's text messages, that's the switch — one calendar, on every device you own, that the booking page is allowed to write to.
Can I require a deposit so people turn up?
You can. Set the amount, pick which services need one, and it's charged the moment the appointment is made rather than chased down afterward.
What do booking and payments cost?
Booking synced to your Google Calendar, payment integration, the reminder and follow-up messages, and the CRM behind them are all Growth, $500 a month with a $500 setup. Foundation, $250 a month with a one-time $250 setup, is the site, the Google Business Profile, the email and the SEO — enough to be found, without the booking. A year paid up front is 15% off either one — $2,550 or $5,100, with setup billed separately.
Try it on a working one before you believe us.
Knox Chops is a real barbershop we built, booking and all. Pick a time, watch the confirmation arrive, then call (331) 291‑7400 and we'll set yours up the same way.
Tell us how your day gets booked now.
Phone, texts, a notebook, or all three at once. We'll show you the same day on a calendar.
A real person reads this and gets back to you within 24 hours. If it's urgent, (331) 291‑7400 rings a phone.