Appointment Settings & Presets

Set store-wide booking rules, use a data-backed preset as a starting point, and understand the setup checklist, validation, and recovery states.

Use Settings to set the store-wide defaults that shape the appointment slot search and the customer cancellation policy. It also has a first-run checklist and data-backed preset starting points; a preset is not a separate version of the product.

Open Settings

Screen: In the classic admin sidebar, go to Sales & Orders → Appointments, then select the Settings tab. In the new admin sidebar, go to sell. → Appointments → Settings. The direct route is /appointments/settings.

The appointments sub-navigation contains Calendar, Offerings, Team & Resources, and Settings. Only store administrators and super administrators can open Settings; other roles see the access-restricted route. The Appointments feature must also be enabled for your plan before the page is available.

Work through Getting set up

The Getting set up card marks each item with a completed or pending icon. It is a live summary, not a separate checklist you can tick manually.

The last two rows are status indicators only; they do not open another screen. A store can save booking rules with both the deposit and no-show fee at zero, but that leaves Set booking rules pending. Likewise, clearing the reminder field leaves Set reminder cadence pending.

Start from a preset

Under Start from a preset, each returned preset is shown as a clickable chip. Selecting a chip opens a confirmation dialog before anything changes — applying a preset now replaces every booking rule field below with that preset's defaults, including fields you've already customised and saved. Read the dialog's warning, then select Apply preset to confirm or Cancel to back out with no change. A confirmed apply updates the form with the returned values and shows Preset applied.

Presets are data records, not vertical-specific code paths. Their names and available choices come from the store's preset list, so use the chip label shown on your page rather than expecting a fixed set of choices. After applying, you can still adjust individual fields and select Save settings to keep the values you want — the preset only sets the starting point, it does not lock the fields.

Set booking rules

The form starts with the values already saved for the store. Enter numeric values in the six number fields, use commas to separate reminder offsets, and turn the team-member switch on or off.

What decides whether the resource and payment steps exist at all

Two of the settings above do double duty: they also decide whether a step in the booking funnel is reachable at all, not just how it behaves.

Settings always win over anything saved in the Booking page editor — turning Let customers pick a specific team member off removes the resource step from the funnel even if that step's format was customised, and there is no editor-side switch that can turn it back on while the setting is off. The reverse direction is narrower: with this setting left on, the editor's own Staff / resource picker on/off switch can shift the funnel's step count and progress labels, but it does not stop the resource-picker screen itself from being visited for an offering with more than one available resource — see Booking Experience Editor → When the on/off switch reaches the live funnel.

Validation and failed saves

The page converts every numeric input to a number when you edit it, but it does not show field-level validation before saving. The service rejects values outside the ranges in the table, non-whole numbers where a whole number is required, an invalid team-picker value, or a reminder list with a duplicate, a negative value, a decimal, or an offset beyond one year. A failed save keeps the form available and shows the returned error notification; correct the value and save again.

For reminders, spaces around comma-separated values are ignored. Text that cannot be read as a number is removed before saving, so recheck the field rather than assuming a typed label or stray text will be preserved.

How reminder delivery works

The saved offsets are now used by the scheduled reminder sweep. While the jobs service is running, it checks due confirmed or checked-in bookings on its configured five-minute schedule, asks the booking service to claim each due cadence once, and sends a reminder through the existing notification path. A booking that is cancelled, already started, or has already claimed that cadence for its current booked time is not selected again. Rescheduling a booking to a new time is not blocked by an earlier claim: the claim is tied to the booked time, so a cadence that already fired for the old time can fire again for the new one if it now falls due.

This is intentionally not a delivery guarantee or a customer-visible history. The durable claim prevents duplicate selection, but a failure after the claim and before the notification call can leave a reminder unsent. The Settings screen has no resend control or delivery log, so use the booking record and the notification operations path when investigating a missing reminder.

Loading and recovery

Settings initially loads the active offerings, active team/resources, saved settings, and presets together. While any initially empty source is still loading, the page shows a form skeleton instead of a partial checklist or form.

If any initially empty source fails, the page shows Couldn't load appointment settings. with Retry. Retry reloads all four sources. If a source has already returned entries, a later refresh failure does not replace the populated page with that initial-load error state.

Troubleshoot booking rules

• If customers cannot choose a near-term slot, check Minimum notice (mins). Also inspect the offering itself: an offering-specific notice value overrides the store default.
• If a future date has no returned slots, compare it with Booking horizon (days), then check the offering's assigned resources and their availability.
• If customers cannot cancel, check Cancellation window (hrs). Once the current time reaches the appointment start time minus that window, the customer cancellation action is unavailable.
• If a configured reminder was not received, first confirm that the booking remains Confirmed or Checked in, that its start time is still in the future, and that the configured offset has passed. Then have an administrator check the notification operations path; this Settings page cannot show whether a specific dispatch succeeded.
• If the checklist stays pending after you save, check the exact conditions above: it needs an active offering, an active resource, a positive deposit or no-show fee, or at least one reminder entry. It does not infer completion from related setup work.
• Applying a preset overwrites every booking-rule field with that preset's defaults, even fields you've already customised and saved — this is intentional (the confirmation dialog says so) and cannot be undone once applied. If you didn't mean to reset a customised field, re-enter its previous value and select Save settings afterward, or select Cancel in the confirmation dialog next time instead of Apply preset.
• If Retry keeps returning the loading error, confirm the Appointments feature is available to the store plan and ask a store administrator to check the appointment configuration service.

Next steps

• Create an offering.
• Add team members and resources.
• Set availability.
• Understand customer booking and cancellation.