Appointment Booking Page (Your Own Spreadsheet & Calendar)

About the Appointment Booking Page (Your Own Spreadsheet & Calendar)

Give a salon, clinic, tutor, consultant or repair shop its own online booking page. Enter the services (length, a gap kept after each, price), the staff if you have them, the opening hours with breaks, closed days, how much notice you need, how far ahead people may book and a daily limit — then try the booking panel right here as a customer would, with a made-up schedule.

The builder writes three things: the booking panel for your website (a snippet to paste, or a page of its own), the script that runs the bookings in your own spreadsheet and calendar under your own account, and a set-up guide. Each booking is checked again and written under a lock, so two people can never take the same time; it is added to your calendar, and the customer gets a confirmation e-mail with a calendar file and a private link to cancel or move it, plus a reminder before the appointment. A test mode lets you try the whole flow on your live page before customers use it.

MySmartCoPilot hosts nothing of your booking page and never sees a booking. Without a pass you can build and try everything, and the files show their first lines; a Premium pass gives the whole widget, page, script and guide to copy or download.

Common uses

• A salon, barber or spa letting clients book a service and a stylist.
• A clinic, physiotherapist or counsellor taking appointments with notice and a daily limit.
• A tutor, coach or consultant offering sessions to people in other time zones.
• A repair shop or service desk booking drop-off times without phone calls.

How a booking works

The panel on your site asks your script for the open times of a day; the script works them out from your set-up, the bookings in your spreadsheet and, if you choose, the timed events in your calendar. When a customer books, the panel sends the booking straight to your script, which waits for the script lock (Apps Script’s Lock Service lets one booking through at a time), checks that the time is still open, writes the row and adds the calendar event — so a time can never be booked twice. Then it e-mails the customer a confirmation with a calendar file (iCalendar) and a private link, and you a notice. The private link opens a page where the customer can cancel or choose another time until the deadline you set.

Limits of your own account

Everything runs on Google’s own limits for your account (Apps Script quotas): e-mail recipients 100 a day on a Gmail account and 1,500 on Google Workspace; calendar events created 5,000 a day (10,000 on Workspace); 20 triggers per user per script; at most 6 minutes per run. Each booking sends two e-mails (the customer and you) and each reminder one, so a Gmail account handles about 30 bookings a day with reminders on. The reminders come from a trigger that runs once an hour, so a reminder can arrive up to an hour after the time you set: one set for 24 hours before comes between 24 and 23 hours before the appointment.

Your customers’ data

Names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and answers go from the customer’s browser straight to the spreadsheet in your own account. MySmartCoPilot never receives them. You are responsible for them: say on your booking page or privacy notice why you collect them and how long you keep them, ask only for what you need, and delete old bookings when you no longer need them.

Test mode

With test mode on (the default), the script writes bookings to a sheet named “Test bookings”, makes no calendar events and sends every e-mail to you, with “[Test]” in the subject. Book a few times from your real page, open the links in the e-mails, then switch test mode off under Publish, paste the new script into the project and deploy a new version — the web app address stays the same.

Limitations

• It takes bookings, not payments: no card or wallet payments are collected.
• No text messages: confirmations and reminders are e-mails sent from your own account, within its daily limit.
• All-day events in your calendar do not block times; use closed days for holidays.
• One e-mail address can hold up to 3 upcoming bookings at a time, so nobody can fill the diary; a customer who needs more can cancel one or ask you.
• The first booking after a quiet spell can take a few seconds while Google starts the script.
• One booking panel per page; for several locations, make one set-up (and one script) for each.

Privacy

The set-up is kept in this browser (and in settings files you save yourself) and is never uploaded. The live preview’s bookings exist only in this page. On your own site, bookings go from your customers straight to your own spreadsheet and calendar.