BOOKING & PAYMENTS — LOMBARD, ILLINOIS
Online booking and payments in Lombard, IL, when everything currently runs through your phone.
A number on a sign only works during the hours somebody can pick it up. The rest of the time it's a small test your customer decides not to take.
Twenty minutes. You get a written plan and a price. Nothing starts until you say so.
A fair share of the people who want you won't call you.
This is the part owners argue with, and it's the easiest claim on the page to check. Think about how you booked the last haircut, table or appointment you made for yourself. Calling a stranger and negotiating a time out loud has quietly become a task most people will avoid if any other route exists, and where none exists they find somebody who offers one.
That isn't everybody, and nothing here takes the phone away — plenty of your customers will always want to hear a voice. What a booking page does is stop you losing the ones who were never going to call in the first place, at ten at night, on a Sunday, or while both of your hands were inside somebody else's job.
The calendar has to become real before any of this works.
Businesses at this stage usually keep the diary in one of three places: a paper book beside the register, the notes app, or somebody's head. None of the three can be read by a website, so the first move is onto a Google Calendar that lives on every device you own and gets checked by everybody who needs it.
That calendar comes with the email included in your plan, so it isn't another subscription to find. Once it's the only copy, the booking page both reads it and writes to it, and any hours you block out for something else simply stop being offered to anyone.
Put two services on the page to begin with, not eleven.
The temptation with a new booking page is to list everything you're capable of doing. It makes the page long, it makes choosing hard, and it gets you booked for exactly the jobs you're least confident about timing.
So it opens with the two or three you could price and schedule in your sleep, each with a truthful duration, a gap behind it for clearing up, and a rule about how soon somebody may claim a slot. Everything else stays behind an enquiry form until you know its shape well enough to sell it while you aren't in the room. Services move from one side to the other as you learn, and that's the normal course of a first year rather than a sign anything went wrong.
The confirmation and the reminder are texts you stop having to write.
The confirmation is immediate, and it's the one claim here you can verify in about a minute — make a booking in the barbershop demo and watch what turns up in your own inbox.
After that comes the day-before reminder with the time and the address inside it. Between them, those two messages remove most of the back-and-forth texting that currently eats an hour of your evening, and most of the people who would otherwise have simply forgotten. On Growth they run automatically, along with the thank-you afterwards.
Taking a card when you've never taken one online.
Deposits exist for one reason. The slot is the only thing you actually sell, and somebody who doesn't appear has taken it out of your day and handed you nothing back. A card taken at the moment of booking filters for intention, and the filtering happens quietly, before it has cost you a morning.
The same connection handles an order placed on the site, a link inside a text, and a card run at the counter, with all three recording against the person who paid rather than living in a separate app you check at closing time. Taking cards is a Growth feature, at $500 a month after a $500 setup, and so is the booking that writes to your calendar. Foundation, at $250 a month after $250 at the outset, is the site, the profile, the email and the search work — enough to be found, without the booking.
In a year you'll want to know who booked what, and when.
For the first few months a booking page is about convenience. Give it a year and it becomes history — how often that customer comes, what she has spent with you, whether she is late, which services bring people back and which ones nobody ever repeats.
That's what the ledger underneath is for, and it's the reason we'd rather set the calendar up carefully at the start than tidy up twelve months of half-kept records afterwards.
Look at what a village actually schedules itself around. Helen Plum Library is one of those places and Glenbard East is another, and between them they account for a good share of where people in Lombard have to be on a weekday evening. Arrangements get made in the gaps left over — sitting in a car outside a school, standing in line somewhere, at half nine at night once the house has finally gone quiet. Those are exactly the hours your phone goes unanswered and your door is locked, and they are the hours a booking page is paid to cover.
The booking page is the cheapest way to start keeping records.
'CRM' is only the name for wherever customer information ends up living, and for most businesses at this stage that's a phone and a memory. Every appointment taken online writes a line of a proper one without anybody doing data entry — who, what, when, how much, and how they found you. Growth carries the rest of it, from invoices through to follow-up, expenses and the monthly page of numbers, at $500 a month with a one-time $500 setup.
Questions people actually ask
Straight answers.
I'm not much good with computers. Is running this going to be my job?
No. We set the services, the durations, the gaps and the rules with you at the start, and after that the only thing you touch is your own calendar — the same one on your phone. Changes to prices or hours are something you ask us for, and they're included. Nobody hands you an admin panel and wishes you luck.
What stops two people booking the same time?
The page offers only what the calendar says is free, and a slot is held the moment somebody starts confirming it, so the second person never sees it as available. Anything you add to your calendar by hand closes those hours immediately. The failure people fear comes from systems keeping a diary of their own, and this one doesn't keep a second diary.
What do booking and payments come to?
Booking synced to your Google Calendar, card payments, the messages that go out by themselves and the records all of it writes into are Growth, which runs $500 monthly after $500 at the start. Foundation, at $250 monthly and $250 once, is the site, the profile, the email and the search work, without the booking. Pay for the year at once and 15% comes off, making it $2,550 or $5,100, with setup billed apart from that.
Book something in a demo and watch the whole loop close.
Knox Nails is a complete salon we built, booking included. Choose a time, wait for the confirmation to arrive, then work out what those same thirty seconds would be worth across a Saturday of yours. When it makes sense, call (331) 291‑7400.
Tell us how a booking reaches you today.
However it arrives now, we'll show you the same week handled without a single phone call.
A real person reads this and gets back to you within 24 hours. If it's urgent, (331) 291‑7400 rings a phone.