I run an auto detailing business by myself and I am trying to create a booking system so my customers can automatically book a detail without having to message me.
I have three different locations that I operate out of, and I would like for them to be able to choose the location and time.
Here is the tricky part.. I cant be double booked, so I need to find a way to limit this..
Any help is appreciated
I currently have two tables set up, Appointments and services. All fairly basic stuff.
Thanks
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I think you’d need to create one record per location per time slot, and then create a form that’ll let users select one of those records, and not allow a record to be selected twice. It’s doable, but somewhat tedious to set up, especially the bit about one record per location per time slot which I think you’d need a script to do. Hopefully someone else has a better idea!
Doing this natively in Airtable might not be the best fit, really, and I'd suggest you explore using a scheduling service that then pushes into Airtable instead, that way the scheduling logic’s all handled for you but you still get to use Airtable for your day to day business needs
Fillout has a scheduling thing that you can try, I think the free tier has 1k schedules but you might want to confirm that: https://www.fillout.com/scheduling
If not, you could also look into using Calendly or something and use their sync to Google Calendar, then sync Google Calendar into Airtable: https://calendly.com/
@noahb123
As @TheTimeSavingCo mentioned above, this is probably not something that you would want to setup in Airtable, as Airtable is not designed to be a scheduling or booking system.
I would highly recommend looking at Fillout Scheduling first, because it is 100% free and it also enables you to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.
Fillout offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, control access to a form via SSO or email domains, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, create new linked records on a form, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.
I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:
Both answers above are great. You could handle this on Airtable by creating all available booking slots PER location, but that would not be ideal. In addition to Fillout and Calendly, let me suggest you look into Cal (no affiliation). Cal is great as it includes webhook integrations, as well as multiple scheduling links, and other features, with its free plan.
In fact, that is what I use for my own business. As soon as a booking occurs, that makes a webhook call to an n8n automation (could also be zapier, or make -more on this automation tools here).
If the contact exists, it will just create the booking and link it to such contact. If the contact does not exist, it will create the contact and create the booking (and link it). You can see a screenshot of my automation below.
If you need any help setting this up, please feel free to reach out! I’d be happy to help.
Yes, as a follow-up to what @Mike_AutomaticN wrote above:
If you do this entirely in Airtable, you’ll need to use the methodology that Mike mentioned above. That’s what I demonstrate in my Airtable podcast episode, but again, this is not really recommended because it’s so limiting & time-intensive to setup.
