Everything you need to run on DayO Book.

This is the core of the business — who you book, what you offer, what it costs, and when you're open. Everything else in this guide sits on top of what you set up here.

Create a free account at /signup — no setup call, no credit card required. You'll land in the setup wizard, which takes about two minutes:

• Pick an industry template — salon, boarding, medical, restaurant, fitness, home services, tutoring, professional services, auto, or “something else.” This pre-fills what you call a resource (Stylist, Room, Table, Provider…) and a starting set of services you can edit.
• Name your business and pick a URL slug — this becomes your booking page at dayobook.com/book/your-slug.

Users & capacity

Add each resource — every stylist, room, or table — from the Resources page, with a capacity for how many bookings it can hold at once. A single stylist is capacity 1; a boarding room that fits three dogs is capacity 3. Add, edit, or remove resources any time.

Services & pricing

Each service has a mode:

• Slot mode — a standard appointment with a fixed duration (a haircut, a checkup), plus optional buffer time afterward for cleanup or turnover.
• Span mode — a multi-day stay (boarding). The customer picks a check-in date and a number of nights instead of a time.

Set a price per service, and scope which resources offer it — useful when only some stylists offer color, for example.

Availability, business hours & holidays

Availability sets each resource's recurring weekly hours — the building block behind every open slot on your booking page. Holidays & Closures handles the exceptions: close a specific date entirely (business-wide or for one resource), or set special hours for a single day without touching your regular schedule. Both are enforced automatically — customers never see a slot that conflicts with a closure.

Email templates

Four lifecycle emails send automatically: confirmation, change, cancellation, and reminder (with a one-tap confirm-you're-coming link built in). Each can be turned off or rewritten from the Emails page, using placeholders like {{customer_name}}, {{start_time}}, and {{manage_link}} — no code required.

Make the booking widget look like your brand — it shows up everywhere your customers book: your hosted page, your website embed, and any booking link you share.

• Colors — pick a preset or set your own primary and accent colors from the Widget design page.
• Logo — upload one (up to 300KB); it appears atop the widget and on your customers' manage-booking page.
• Live preview — see changes before you save; they apply instantly everywhere once you do.

Real flexibility if you want to send out customized links — not needed for core booking to work. Your main hosted page and embed already handle everything on their own; booking links are an extension on top, useful for specific situations.

Create one from the Booking Links page and scope it to any combination of:

• One resource — a stylist's own personal link, for their own bio or business card.
• Specific services — a link that only offers certain services, e.g. a promo for one treatment.
• Days or hours — restrict a link to certain days of the week or a time window.

This is exactly the kind of thing that's useful for a marketing campaign or a retargeting ad — a dedicated link you can track separately from your general booking page, pointed at exactly the service or person the campaign is about.

You're billed per successful booking — $0.50 by default — monthly or quarterly on the anchor day you choose. No monthly fee, no per-seat charge, and billing is combined across every business on your account into one invoice per cycle.

• Cancelled before the appointment time: never billed.
• Cancelled after the appointment time (a no-show or a late cancel): still billed, since the slot was already held.
• Add a payment method from the Billing page to have each closed cycle charged automatically; without one, invoices are still tracked so nothing is lost — you can pay manually.
• Price changes only ever apply to your next billing cycle — never retroactively.

Every business gets a hosted booking page at dayobook.com/book/your-slug — nothing to build, share the link anywhere. To put the widget directly on your own site, drop in one script tag:

<script src="https://www.dayobook.com/embed.js" data-business="your-slug" async></script>

Best practices for the most coverage

• Use both — embed it on your site and share the hosted link in places you can't embed (Instagram bio, Google Business Profile, a QR code on a receipt or table tent). It's the same widget everywhere, so branding stays consistent.
• Put it where the decision happens — on your services or pricing page, not buried in a footer link.
• Use a scoped booking link (see #3) for anything you're specifically promoting, so that traffic lands directly on the right service or person instead of a generic starting point.

This is how you plan your day. The Calendar shows the week at a glance, color-coded by resource (or by business, in combined view) — and it's fully interactive:

• Drag and drop — grab any booking and drag it to a new day or time to reschedule it on the fly. A conflicting drop is rejected automatically; nothing gets double-booked.
• Week navigation — move forward and back to plan ahead or review what already happened.
• Combined view — if you run more than one business, see every business's bookings on one calendar, still validated against each business's own hours and conflicts.

This is all about your business performance. At a glance:

• Successful bookings this period — the number that drives billing.
• Widget sessions and conversion rate — how many visitors actually book.
• Failed bookings (slot conflicts) and abandoned sessions (started, never finished).
• A six-month trend of successful bookings, and a funnel from widget viewed → slot selected → details entered → confirmed.
• Recent bookings, filterable by resource, service, or date range, with Excel export.

Like the Calendar, it can show one business at a time or a combined view across every business on your account.

If you operate more than one business — a second location, a different brand — run them all on the same account. Add one from “+ New business” in the sidebar and switch between them with the dropdown at the top.

Each business gets its own slug, resources, services, bookings, and settings — but billing is combined into one invoice per cycle across all of them. The Dashboard and Calendar can show one business at a time, or everything together in a combined view.

When a customer can't find an opening, they don't have to just give up — they can join the waitlist right from your booking page, for the specific date and service they wanted.

How it works

• Joining — if there's no availability for a chosen date and service, the widget offers to add them to the waitlist instead, with an optional preferred resource.
• When a spot opens — the moment a matching booking is cancelled (same service, same date, and resource if they specified one), the system automatically finds the longest-waiting match and sends them a claim link. No admin action needed — it's instant.
• Claiming — it's first come, first served. The customer clicks the link and books the freed slot directly; if it's somehow already gone, they're told so clearly.
• Expiry — an unclaimed offer eventually returns to “waiting,” so that customer stays eligible for the next matching opening too.

See everyone waiting from the Waitlist page — filter to active entries or see the full history, and remove anyone manually if needed. This currently applies to standard time-slot services, not multi-night boarding stays.

Your internal marketing tool for turning past customers into more bookings — built from your own booking history, no separate CRM to keep in sync.

Customers

The Customers page shows every customer who's ever booked with you — total bookings, total spend, last visit, and a no-show risk flag for anyone with a repeat no-show history.

Setting up a campaign

From the Marketing page you have two starting points:

• Suggested campaigns — goal-based ideas backed by your own real numbers (“12 customers haven't booked in 90+ days”), plus your quietest upcoming days — good candidates for a “we have an opening” push. Click one to prefill the audience and goal below.
• Build your own — set any audience yourself: hasn't booked in N+ days, has booked a specific service or with a specific resource, or customers who've only booked once so far. Fully manual, no suggestion required.

Writing it — with AI if you want

Describe the goal in plain language (“win back customers who've gone quiet”) and click Generate with AI — you'll get a ready-to-send subject and body written around that specific goal and audience. It's always yours to edit before anything sends, and you can regenerate as many times as you want. Prefer to write it yourself? Skip the AI entirely and type directly into the subject and body fields.

Send now or schedule it for later. An unsubscribe link is always appended automatically, and anyone who opts out is excluded from every future campaign. Track status and recipient counts from the campaign history below the composer.

Reducing no-shows

Beyond the waitlist (#9), a few more tools work together, all on by default: confirm-you're-coming links on every reminder, one-click no-show marking on the Bookings page, and automatic risk flags for repeat no-shows on your Customers and Bookings pages.

Self-service for your customers

Every customer gets a private manage link on their confirmation email, so they can reschedule or cancel themselves without calling you.

Settings

Update your business name, timezone, and what you call a resource (Stylist, Room, Table, Provider — whatever fits) from the Settings page. Your mailing address, if set, appears in the footer of marketing campaign emails.