Setting up your booking system with a photo of your price list

Ask any salon or clinic owner why they have not switched booking software yet. They almost never say "the price". They say something like this: "because I don't have a free afternoon to set it up".

And they are right. Entering forty services with their price and duration, the hours for each day, the team and what each person does is hours of work, the kind that gets left for Sunday, and Sunday never comes.

What a booking system needs to be told

Before a system can give a single appointment, it needs to know four things:

1. The services, with their price and how long they take.
2. The business's hours, with its closures and holidays.
3. The team: who works and when.
4. Who does what: the stylist who does not do nails, the dentist who only does implants.

None of it is hard. What wears you out is typing it into one form after another. And almost all of it already exists in writing somewhere: on the price list at the counter, on the opening hours on the door, in the head of whoever runs the business.

Setting it up by talking

That is why in ClaudIA, setting up is a conversation. ClaudIA asks you one thing at a time, with big buttons, and you answer as you would to someone at the front desk.

• Services, from a photo. You take a photo of your price list — even if it runs to several pages — and ClaudIA reads the services and groups them. If the list does not say how long something takes, it estimates it and flags it for you to check. Your website, or simply typing them out, works too.
• Opening hours, from another. A photo of the hours on your door, one tap if they are one of the usual patterns, or written however you would say them.
• The team, by name. It asks who works with you, what each person does and whether anyone keeps different hours.

While you talk, you see the business taking shape at the side. And if you are interrupted — you will be — you leave it halfway and it picks up where you left off.

Trying it before it talks to anyone

Once the business is set up, the sensible thing is to try it before connecting it to your real WhatsApp. From the panel you write to it as if you were someone wanting to book and see how it answers, with your real services, hours and schedule. It is only a test: it books nothing, moves nothing and alerts nobody, and if it would have booked in a real conversation, it tells you under the message.

It is the best moment to fine-tune: what you call each technique, your cancellation policy, that question you get every week.

And if you get stuck

Any question about the panel can be asked on WhatsApp, at any hour, as a voice note or a screenshot of what you are looking at too. The support assistant answers, looks at how your business is set up and tells you what is missing and where to fix it; and if you would rather speak to a person, the team takes over.

Your clients, for their part, come across in a few minutes from the software you use or from your phone's contacts, as we explain in moving your clients from one program to another. And what happens in the first month is in how ClaudIA fits your business.

The free afternoon to set up new software is never going to come. So it is better if setting it up does not need one.