Complete post-onboarding setup guide: from signup to a fully operational business in under an hour

This article is the entry point for anyone who just signed up to BookHero. It is the guide you want next to you for the first 60 to 90 minutes: it covers every important decision in the right order, with time markers so you can feel progress. By the end, your business is at 100%: team invited, services published, public page shareable and the calendar ready for your first client.

Rather than duplicating every detailed feature guide, this article gives you the essentials of each phase and deep links to the long form. Under every section you will see a 'full guide: how to do X' line that opens the in-depth piece. Read the phase, execute, come back for the next one.

Phase 1: business identity (5-10 min)

The first place to go right after signup is Business page. This is where your public identity lives: business name, short description, phone, contact email and address. These fields are not vanity. The name shows up in confirmation emails, the public page and receipts; the address powers the Maps link from the storefront; the email is the sender for notifications.

Take the chance to upload your logo and cover image (banner). You do not need perfect files: use what you have, swap later. The built-in cropper lets you frame each image. Define your brand primary color too, which paints buttons and the header of the public page.

Full guide: customize the public page (storefront).

Phase 2: services, the single most important piece (15-20 min)

If there were only one phase to do well, this would be it. Services drive everything else: what shows up on the public page, how long each calendar slot takes, what commission each employee gets, what goes into the checkout cart and what revenue appears in reports. Investing 15-20 minutes here saves hours later.

Create between 8 and 15 services, enough to cover 90% of what you sell. For each one, decide: a short, clear name (the client gets it without explanation), a realistic duration (with setup and cleanup baked in, not just the active time) and a price. Price can be fixed (€15), 'from' (starting at €15) or variable (no visible amount, you decide at checkout). Resist the urge to create 50 variants of the same service; prefer wider services with addons.

Group services into categories (Hair, Beard, Skincare, etc.) and drag to set the order the client sees on the public page. Order matters: the most popular service goes up top. If you sell physical products (shampoo, wax, vouchers), create them under the 'Products' tab of Business page, not as services.

Full guides: create and manage services and service groups and products in checkout.

Phase 3: team (10 min, skip if you work solo)

If you work solo, skip this phase guilt-free: your own user already acts as the employee and is assigned to every service. Come back when you hire your first person. If you have a team from day one, head to Employees and invite each member by email. They get an acceptance link and create their own password.

For each employee, set four things: role (owner, manager, employee or basic), services they perform (service matrix), individual schedule (base week with days off) and commission (if applicable). The role defines what they see in BookHero; the matrix defines which services can be assigned to them in the calendar; the schedule defines when they appear as available.

Full guides: add employees and individual schedules, team roles and permissions explained and configure team commissions.

Phase 4: base hours and booking rules (5 min)

The business base hours live in Business page › Hours. Set when you open each day of the week and any breaks (lunch, for example). This is the 'establishment' schedule. Each employee can have a tighter individual schedule (say, Rita works afternoons only), but never wider than the business hours.

Then tune the online booking rules. The three that matter most: booking window (how far ahead clients can book), minimum lead time (cutoff: 'do not allow bookings less than 2 hours from now') and cancellation deadline. These three numbers prevent 90% of the headaches: last-minute bookings with no prep time, late cancellations, or clients trying to book 3 months out.

If your team has more than one person who can perform the same service, decide on the auto-assign strategy. When a client picks 'any professional' on the public page, BookHero distributes them among the available ones. You can choose balanced load, first available, or disable auto-assign and force the client to pick a person.

Full guides: configure booking window and cutoffs and automatic employee assignment strategies.

Phase 5: email and WhatsApp notifications (5 min)

Email confirmations are the default you should keep on: every booking created on the public page fires an automatic email to the client, with time, address and a cancel link. On your side, the owner and managers get an email each time a new booking arrives. You do not need to do anything for this to work; just make sure the sender email in Business page is correct.

24-hour reminders cut no-shows by 30-50%. Switch them on under Notifications. If you are on the Pro plan, add WhatsApp reminders too, with near 100% open rate. Set it up once, forget forever. There is no technical setup: you link the number, accept verification and the system takes it from there.

Full guide: configure email and WhatsApp notifications.

Phase 6: public page, sharing and QR (5 min)

Before sharing the link, open the public page yourself in an incognito tab (Ctrl+Shift+N or private mode). Make a test booking for a service, pick a professional and a time, and confirm the confirmation email lands in your inbox. This end-to-end test catches 90% of small misconfigurations: wrong hours, service with no price, employee with no availability.

When everything checks out, your public link is something like bookhero.app/your-slug. Share it on Instagram, in your email signature, on physical flyers. In Business page › Customization you also have an auto-generated QR code to print and stick in the window or on a business card. The client points the phone at it and lands straight on the booking page.

Full guide: customize the public page (storefront).

Phase 7: your first day of operation (10 min of practice)

Setup is done. Now comes the part you will repeat every day. To shorten the learning curve, run through four core actions before your first real client: create a manual booking, run a checkout, manage a public booking and learn the calendar views. Five to ten minutes of deliberate practice and the product stops feeling foreign.

Start by creating a manual booking in the calendar. Tap the green 'Book' button (bottom-right corner) or click directly on an empty slot in Day view. Pick a fake client, time and service, then confirm. You learn the creation panel, the relationship between services and employees and what each warning means.

Full guide: create a manual booking in the calendar.

Next, run a checkout. Open that fake booking, tap 'Go to checkout', confirm the cart and finalize with 'Cash' as the method. You do not need to actually collect anything; the goal is to internalize the flow. You learn the payment view, tip, discount and receipt generation.

Full guide: how to checkout in BookHero.

Once the first bookings land from the public page, you will need to know what to do: confirm them (most is automatic), reschedule internally, cancel with a client alert, or communicate a change. The flows are short but have subtleties (auto-notifications, behavior at the free-plan limit).

Full guides: manage bookings from the public page and calendar views and when to use each.

Phase 8: ongoing maintenance (week to week)

Past day one, four tasks come back regularly and are worth doing on autopilot: blocking time (lunch, training, ad-hoc absence), approving team time-off, rescheduling and cancelling when a client calls in, and reading the reports once a week to see what is growing.

• Block time on the calendar: fixed lunch, training, ad-hoc absence.
• Manage team time-off: requests, approvals, propagation to the public calendar.
• Reschedule and cancel bookings: the recommended path with client notification.
• Read the reports: revenue, bookings, employees, clients.
• Manage clients in BookHero: history, stats, profile editing.

Final setup checklist

1. 1

   Identity in place

   Name, description, contacts, address, logo, cover and brand color filled in under Business page.

2. 2

   Services created

   8-15 services with name, duration and price. Grouped into categories and ordered by popularity.

3. 3

   Team invited (if applicable)

   Every employee with a role assigned, service matrix filled and commission configured.

4. 4

   Schedule and rules defined

   Business base hours, individual employee schedules, booking window and cancellation cutoff.

5. 5

   Notifications on

   Confirmations and 24h reminders active. Sender email correct. WhatsApp linked if you are on Pro.

6. 6

   Storefront tested

   Test booking made in incognito, confirmation received in your inbox, link and QR ready to share.

7. 7

   First practice run done

   You have already created a manual booking, run a fake checkout and walked through all four calendar views.

Common setup mistakes to avoid

• Unrealistic durations. Setting cut = 20 min because the cut itself takes 20, but forgetting setup, washing and cleanup. Result: stacked bookings. Use the real time, with a buffer.
• 50 services to cover every combination. Overloads the public page and confuses clients. Prefer 10 wide services with addons.
• Forgetting the employee × services matrix. If the employee does not have the service ticked, the system warns but lets you push through; the catch is that the public page will not surface them for that service.
• Not testing the public page before sharing. There is always a surprise: misconfigured hours, awkwardly cropped photo, zero price. Five minutes of testing saves the day.
• Booking window wide open at 90 days with no cutoff. Clients book months ahead and forget; or book 30 minutes out when there is no time. Use realistic values for your business (14-30 days and a 1-2 hour cutoff are good defaults).
• Inviting an employee with the owner role 'by mistake'. That grants full access (billing, account deletion, employee management). For day-to-day operations, manager is enough. For someone who only performs services, employee or basic.

Frequently asked questions