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Bookings & Scheduling

Bookings turn your site into a scheduling tool: define services, publish your availability, and let visitors book time — with optional payment and automatic reminders.

The Bookings page in the Aglyn console, with a Services card for defining bookable services and an Upcoming bookings card

Plan availability

Paid. Paid bookings use Stripe; reminder emails are included.

Paid services need Stripe connected first

A paid booking is a destination charge into your own Stripe account, so the booking widget cannot take money until Stripe Connect onboarding is finished and Stripe reports charges enabled. Until then a visitor who picks a paid service is told "Payments are not set up yet" and the slot is not held. Free services are unaffected — they never touch Stripe. Connect your account from the Payments card on the Products hub; see Commerce.

Set up bookings​

  1. Define services (what can be booked, duration, price).
  2. Configure availability — the windows when slots are offered.
  3. Add the booking widget to a screen as a canvas element.

Taking bookings​

  • Visitors pick a slot through the booking widget; the booking API records it.
  • For paid services, Stripe collects payment and a slot hold prevents double-booking during checkout.
  • Reminder emails go out automatically ahead of the appointment — see below.

24-hour reminders​

Every confirmed booking gets one reminder email roughly a day before it starts. A background pass runs each hour and mails the bookings that are then 23–25 hours out, so a reminder lands about 24 hours ahead rather than at an exact minute.

A booking is reminded once. The pass records that it has sent, so a booking is never mailed twice, and these do not go out for cancelled bookings or for bookings taken without an email address.

The reminder uses your designed booking reminder email template if you have one, and your own brand if your plan includes white-labelling; otherwise it sends a plain text reminder naming the service and the time.

Where to see it. The Upcoming bookings card shows 24-hour reminders · N due in the next pass · N already sent, counted with the same rule the sender uses — so it is the queue that will actually be drained, not an estimate.

Payments and fees​

Money for a paid booking goes to you, not to Aglyn. The charge is created on your connected Stripe account, and Aglyn takes its platform fee out of it as the Stripe Connect application fee — the same way a storefront sale works.

  • A booking is priced as a service, which bills at your plan's digital transaction rate: 5% on Starter, 3% on Pro, 2% on Business, 1% on Scale, and 0% from Advanced up. It is the same rate and the same ladder as digital products — bookings are not charged separately or additionally.
  • The fee is taken on the service price only. Stripe's own processing fee is separate and comes out of your account as usual.
  • Your current rate is shown on the Payments card of the Products hub, and the full ladder is on the plans page.

Service tax​

Paid bookings charge no tax by default, and that stays true for every site that does not change it.

A service is not goods: the sales-tax rate configured for your store is a goods rate, and whether a service is taxable is a different question with frequently the opposite answer. So Aglyn does not apply your store's sales rate to an appointment. Instead, Commerce → Settings → Taxes → Service tax is where you set your own rate for it.

When you set one, Aglyn adds it to the booking charge as its own receipt line using the label you choose, and records the amount and the regime on the booking. It is always your own rate — Stripe Tax is never asked to compute it, because it has no service tax code for this and would apply a goods rate to an appointment.

The platform fee is charged on the service price, never on the tax.

Aglyn does not provide tax advice

Aglyn applies the rate you enter and records what was charged. It does not determine whether service tax applies to you, at what rate, or where it should be paid. Confirm your obligations with a qualified tax professional.

Manage​

Use the console bookings page to see and manage upcoming appointments.

Cancelling and refunding​

Cancelling a booking reopens the slot. For a paid booking, cancelling also refunds the visitor through Stripe — the button reads Cancel and refund and tells you the amount before you confirm.

  • The refund pulls the money back out of your account and returns Aglyn's platform fee on it, so a refunded appointment costs you nothing in fees.
  • If the refund fails, the booking is not cancelled. The appointment stays on the list and the message says what went wrong, so you never end up with a cancelled slot the visitor was never paid back for.
  • Refunding is site-admin only, because it moves money.
  • Bookings paid before this was supported have to be refunded from the Stripe dashboard instead — the console will say so, and will remind you to tick Reverse transfer so the amount comes back from your account rather than Aglyn's.