Running your booking system

A guide to the things you'll want to change yourself — adding dates, adjusting hours, checking your forms — plus a short list of what to send my way instead.

1. Getting in

Use a laptop or desktop, not your phone. Acuity's settings screens don't all appear on mobile, and that's why some things looked missing when you tried before.

2. Adding new Harrisburg dates

This is the one you'll do most often. Harrisburg has no standing weekly schedule — every date you work is entered individually, so when your dates run out the location stops appearing.

Under Harrisburg you'll see three groups. That's not a mistake — each one handles a different session length, and they need slightly different end times so your last appointment always starts at the same hour.

1. Click Edit Availability on Group 1.
2. Leave the "regular hours every week" box unchecked. Harrisburg runs on specific dates only.
3. In the calendar underneath, click the date you want to add.
4. Type the hours for that group, exactly as shown in the table. Example: 8:00am-7:30pm
5. Save, then click the next date. Repeat for every date you're adding.
6. Do the same on Group 2 and Group 3, using their own hours from the table.

3. Changing your hours

Same place as adding dates. Click the date you want to change, type the new hours over the old, save.

If you're changing your closing time rather than one date, remember the three groups need three different end times. Take the hour you want your last client to start and add the session length:

Infinite Wisdom works a little differently — it has a repeating weekly schedule for Wednesdays, plus individual Sunday dates. Same three groups, same idea.

4. Blocking a day off

Use this when something comes up on a day you'd normally work. It's quicker than editing your availability, and it doesn't disturb your regular pattern.

You can block part of a day or all of it. Anything already booked stays booked — blocking only stops new bookings.

5. Your intake forms

There are two forms in there. The one that matters is Before Your Massage. The other, Health History & Screening, is an earlier draft and isn't in use.

Please read Before Your Massage all the way through before it goes live. It asks people to confirm they've no health concerns, and if something does apply it points them to a free consultation with you rather than straight to a massage. Your name is on it, so it should sound like you.

Look particularly at the list of health conditions. If anything's missing, worded oddly, or shouldn't be there, tell me and I'll change it.

It's written the way you asked — nobody is turned away. Anyone who flags something, pregnancy included, is pointed to a free consultation with you so you can talk it through and decide together.

6. Connecting payments

You'll see Stripe, Square, and PayPal, each with a Connect button. Pick one and follow it through. You started Square already — there's an email waiting with a "complete the setup" link, and finishing that on a laptop should do it.

This one has to be you — it needs your bank details and ID verification, and that shouldn't come through me.

7. Connecting your own calendar

This solves the double-booking problem you raised. Connect whichever calendar you actually live in, then put your Main Line and Mellow shifts on it. Your booking page will treat that time as busy and stop offering it.

You can connect more than one calendar, so use whichever addresses your appointments actually land in. If one turns out to cause confusion, we can disconnect it — nothing here is permanent.

8. Going live

Nothing is bookable yet — all five services are set to Private on purpose, so we could build without anyone stumbling into a half-finished system.

Turning it on is the last step, once payments are connected and you've read the form. It's three things, in this order:

1. Link the intake form to your services.
2. Switch the services from Private to public.
3. Check the booking page yourself and make a test booking.

Tell me when you're ready and I'll walk through it with you.

9. Changing the website

Text is straightforward — click into it and type. Prices, service descriptions, anything on the page.

Everything else — headings, paragraphs, images — is safe to edit directly.

If something isn't behaving the way you expect, take a screenshot before changing anything and send it over. It's much quicker to fix from a picture of what's actually on screen than from a description.