Setting up booking end to end

Some businesses run on appointments: a clinic's consultations, a studio's classes, a garage's service slots. Booking is how Sonta turns that into something people can reserve — your real working hours become open slots, and a reservation lands as a record you already know how to work with. It is not a separate scheduling tool bolted on the side; it is built from the same locations, departments, and collections you already have. This guide walks the whole chain, from the hours you keep to a booking on the calendar.

The chain, end to end

Booking rests on a short chain, and every piece has a job. A business has one or more locations — the places you operate. Each location has departments — the units that actually do the work. Each department keeps its own working hours. And on top of all that, a collection is made bookable so its entries can be scheduled against those hours. Read that chain once more, because setting up booking is filling it in from the top: where, who, when, and what gets booked.

Locations and departments

Locations and departments are not booking-only ideas — they are the same units that separate your records by place and by function, described in the data model. Booking reuses them. A location is a place you operate from; a department is a team or function within it — consultations, servicing, classes. If you already set these up when shaping your business, booking has most of what it needs; if not, you create them first. The reason booking hangs off departments is that different departments keep different schedules, and a slot only makes sense against the department that will honor it.

Working hours are the foundation

Working hours live on the department, set day by day: open Monday nine to five, closed Sunday, and so on. This is the part everything else depends on, so it is worth getting right first. A department with no open day cannot take a booking at all — there are no hours to draw slots from, and availability comes back empty. If you ever set up booking and find nothing is bookable, this is almost always why: the hours have not been set. Hours are not a detail to fill in later; they are the raw material every open slot is cut from.

Making a collection bookable

With the hours in place, you decide what actually gets booked, and that is a collection. Say you keep an Appointments collection, one entry per appointment. To make it bookable, two things happen: the collection needs a date-and-time field to hold when the appointment is, and you turn on booking for the collection with a small profile that ties it together — which location and department the bookings belong to, how long each slot runs, and whether slots are offered by the day or by the hour at a set interval. That profile is what connects the abstract hours to concrete, reservable slots of the right length.

Availability, and the booking itself

Once that is set, the pieces combine on their own. Sonta takes the department's working hours, applies the slot length and interval from the profile, and produces availability — the open times someone can actually choose. When one is chosen, the booking is written as an entry in the collection, with its time on the date field. That last point is the whole idea coming together: a booking is not locked away in a separate calendar app — it is one of your own records, which means you can view it, filter it, automate off it, and act on it exactly like everything else.

A worked example

Take a small clinic. It has one location, and within it a Consultations department whose working hours are set Monday to Friday, nine to five, with the weekend closed. It keeps an Appointments collection — one entry per visit — with a date-and-time field for the appointment slot. Booking is turned on for that collection, pointed at the clinic's location and the Consultations department, with each slot fixed at thirty minutes. From there, availability shows the open half-hours across the working week, a patient takes one, and a new appointment entry appears — ready for a reminder automation and visible on the same board the front desk already watches. Swap the clinic for a salon or a repair bay and only the names change.

Where to go deeper

Booking builds on the rest of your setup, so if you have not shaped it yet, start with create your first business — where locations and departments first come up — and the wider picture in understanding the Sonta data model and working with collections and fields. The individual tasks — creating a location, setting up departments, setting working hours, making a collection bookable, checking availability, and taking a booking — each have their own page in this section.