Bookings and appointments

A salon books a customer with Ayesha at four o'clock on Thursday. A café holds a table for six on Saturday night. A laundry takes the clothes today and gives them back on Thursday. A bakery takes an order for a cake for the 14th with two thousand rupees down. A shop takes an advance order for something it will bring in next week.

These are one thing, not five. Each is a promise to serve somebody at a future date, at one branch, sometimes against a particular person or table — and each turns into an ordinary sale when the customer walks in.

What your shop books against

Settings → Bookings → Booked against. Three answers, one per branch:

A date only is the default, because three of the five kinds of shop that book use it. A bakery is never made to name a person.

Two other settings sit beside it:

• Default appointment length — minutes, used when the form is left empty. Leave it blank for a diary of collection dates, which have no end time.
• Book no further ahead than — 365 days out of the box. It is there to catch a mistyped year: 2027 instead of 2026 parks a cake eleven months out of sight of every screen, and nothing about that goes wrong loudly.

Writing one down

Bookings → New booking. When, how long, who, and what they booked. Only the resource your branch actually books is asked for — a shop set to a date only is never shown a staff picker.

A name and a number is enough for a booking. Somebody who rang up to hold a table is not opening an account. A deposit is different — see below.

One slot, one booking

Where your branch books a stylist or a table, two bookings cannot hold the same one at the same time. Sellify refuses the second one and says who is already booked and when.

It is measured as an overlap, not as the same time: a 45-minute cut at 4:00 and another at 4:15 clash. A cut ending at 4:45 and the next starting at 4:45 do not — that is a full appointment book, not a double booking.

A booking set to a date only blocks nothing. Two cakes for the 14th is an ordinary Saturday.

The deposit

Money down on a cake for Wednesday is real money on Monday. So it is taken like any other payment on account:

Khata → the customer → Take a payment, with the booking named on it.

Three things follow, and none of them needs a second step:

• It is in Monday's drawer, and on Monday's declaration under a heading of its own — Of which booking deposits — so a manager counting the till can tell a promise the shop has not delivered against from a debt it has just collected.
• It is on the customer's ledger as an advance. Their balance goes negative, which is what "in credit" means.
• Nothing about the sale is written on Monday. No order number is spent, no stock moves, no tax is worked out, and Monday's day closes normally.

A deposit needs a customer on the book. A ledger row has to belong to somebody. That is not a hardship — a shop taking money for a cake already knows whose cake it is.

What it looks like end to end

Rs 2,000 down on Monday for a Rs 5,000 cake collected on Wednesday:

At the counter on Wednesday the cashier settles the bill part on account for the Rs 2,000 they already have in credit, and takes Rs 3,000 in cash. The drawer holds only what was really handed over, and the account comes back to nothing on its own.

They walked in

Bookings → They're here. Sellify writes the order from what was booked and hands it straight to the till, where it is settled exactly like any other order the branch is holding.

The price is worked out now, at today's prices, by the same machinery that prices a walk-in — a booking carries no price of its own. If the customer wants something extra at the counter, the cashier adds it to the cart before taking the money.

A closed day refuses a check-in. Taking a booking on a closed day is fine — it moves no money — but checking one in writes a sale, and a sale cannot land on a day that has already been counted. A manager reopens the day first.

They cancelled, or nobody came

Bookings → the bin icon. Two answers, and they are deliberately not the same one:

• They cancelled — somebody rang.
• Nobody came — the chair sat empty and the shop lost the hour.

A reason is required either way. Both free the slot for somebody else; only the second one counts against you on the report.

Money already put down stays where it is — on the customer's ledger as an advance. That is not the same as a refund, and whether you hand it back is your own policy: to give it back, adjust the khata, which records who did it and why.

The two reports

Reports → Bookings — one row per day: booked, arrived, no-show, cancelled, still open, and what was taken down.

Turned up % is measured over the people the diary actually expected — cancellations are left out of it entirely. Somebody who rang a week ahead did not waste the chair, and counting them against you would make a well-run diary read badly. A day nobody booked shows no percentage rather than a perfect one.

Reports → Booking deposits — money the shop is holding against work it has not done yet. What was put down, on what, for when, and whether they have been in.

What bookings do not do yet

Said plainly, because a manual that promises a button nobody can find is worse than one that admits the gap:

• No online booking. Your staff take them, on the phone or at the counter.
• No reminders. Sellify sends no SMS and no WhatsApp.
• No repeating appointments. "Every second Tuesday" is booked one at a time.
• No commission on what a stylist brought in. The booking records who, which is what a commission would be worked out from later.
• One resource per booking. A room booked separately from the person in it is not something Sellify does.
• Nothing works offline. A booking needs the server: what is already in the diary is changing on other people's screens while yours is dark, and a slot check against an out-of-date diary is not a check at all.

Buying it

Bookings is a module. It brings the customer ledger with it — a deposit has to land somewhere — so a shop that buys the diary gets the khata whether or not it asked for one.

Nothing appears anywhere until your plan includes it: no sidebar entry, no reports, and the API refuses a booking rather than quietly accepting it.

Telling the kitchen

A booking is not a sale yet, so nothing goes to the kitchen on its own — which is right for a table at seven this evening and wrong for a cake wanted on the 14th, because somebody has to bake it on the 13th.

Bookings → the booking → Send to kitchen. The card that comes out is headed ADVANCE ORDER, carries FOR and the day and time it is wanted, and lists exactly what was booked with every option on it. No money is on it, like every other kitchen slip.

• The diary says which have gone. A Kitchen column reads Sent 6:02 AM against a booking somebody has already sent, so nobody prints a second card without knowing the first one went.
• Press it again and the whole card prints again. That is what somebody who cannot find the first one wants — it is not a difference, because a booking is one job made once rather than a bill being added to all evening.
• Today / Tomorrow / Next 7 days are one tap each, above the list. A baker coming in at five wants one day, not a week.
• No order is created. The sale is still written at check-in. An order for a cake nobody has made would sit unpaid and stop your day from closing every night until it was collected.

Having it sent for you

Settings → Bookings → Tell the kitchen this many hours ahead. Leave it blank — which is how every branch starts — and nothing is ever sent by itself.

Set it to, say, 12 and Sellify sends each booking once, twelve hours before it is wanted. It runs every hour, so a shop that asks for four hours' notice on a cake wanted at two gets the card at ten.

It never sends the same booking twice, whether you pressed the button yourself or an earlier run did it. And anything already overdue and unsent is sent at the next run rather than skipped, so a day the server was down catches up.

Why it is off to begin with. A slip is only worth printing where somebody is standing to read it. Paper falling into an empty kitchen at two in the morning tells nobody anything, and then nobody knows it happened.