This comprehensive guide provides all the directions needed to set up a YouCanBookMe account for an individual user.
This feature is available on All Plans.
Account Basics
Login to your account
Integrate your calendar account & other services
Setting up your booking pages
Create a booking page
Add Logos & Colors
Link to selected calendars
Check your timezone settings
Set the language of your booking page
Set up your availability
Set your meeting duration
Advanced meeting options
Add questions to your booking form
Customize the After Booking page
Emails & SMS
Notifications overview
Customize confirmation email to booker
Set up reminder emails before the booking
Add additional notifications to your booking page
Send SMS to yourself and your booker
Send booking data to other systems
Customize the Calendar Event
Configure how the booking appears on your linked calendar
Invite another person to all of your bookings
Control how the booking appears on your bookers calendar
Add a video conference link to your calendar events
Share your booking page
Access & Bookmark your booking page link
Embed your booking page in your website
View & Manage bookings
View bookings in YouCanBook.me
Export bookings to a spreadsheet
Cancel & Reschedule bookings
Edit bookers email or phone number
Make appointments for bookers
Account Basics - Login to your account
You can login to your account using the single sign-on from your Google or Outlook account, or with the email and password you used when the account was created.
Tip: The Forgot password link will send an email to the account email address used to sign up for the account. If you're not receiving that reset email, please check that you're requesting the reset link to the correct email address. [ back to top]
Account Basics - Integrate your calendar account & other services
When you created your YouCanBook.me account, you were prompted to integrate either a Google or Outlook calendar. You can view that calendar on your Integrations page in your Account settings. You can choose to integrate additional calendar accounts by clicking Connect under your desired account.
You can also integrate other services on your Integrations page:
- Integrate Gmail to send your confirmation emails directly from your Google-based email account
- Integrate Zoom to generate unique video links for each of your bookings
- Integrate Zapier to connect your YouCanBook.me to thousands of other apps
- Integrate Stripe to take payments for your bookings
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Setting up your booking page - Create a booking page
From your Dashboard on your YouCanBook.me account, you can create new booking pages or edit existing ones. You can create up to 200 booking pages on a single account without any impact on your subscription costs.
To create a new booking page, click Start creating my first booking page.
Tip: To create additional booking pages, click the + Create a new booking page link on your dashboard.
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Setting up your booking page - Add Logos, Introduction & colors
On the What section you can:
1 - Add a headshot or company logo to quickly identify your booking page. Once an image is uploaded it cannot be removed from your account, but it can be overwritten if you upload a new image with the same file name (ie, photo.jpg). Hover over an image to replace it, and click Remove to delete it.
Tip: Images will be cropped in a circle, and square or rectangle images work best. Best practices for uploading an image
2 - Edit your booking page title to reflect the purpose of this booking page
3 - Event Location. This field allows you to tell Google what location to use for the new event. If all your events happen in the same place, click Set Location and enter the physical address in this box. Use any format that works well in the search box on maps.google.com. Choose an address or place, or create a virtual meeting link using Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams.
Tip: If the location of the meeting depends on information your booker enters on the booking form, you can put the shorthand code of that question in the location box, and that selection will pull through to the calendar event.
4 - Customize the booking page link that you'll share with bookers - it must be a minimum of 3 characters, and can only include letters, numbers, and dashes.
5 - In the Booking page Intro box, you can include up to 220 characters for your bookers to see - anything that is pertinent to their booking should be included in this field. You can use this character counter to see if your text meets the requirements.
On the Styles & display tab, inside Additional options, you can select a color for your booking page. There are standard colors to choose from, or you can use a custom HEX color using the formatting #XXXXXX.
Tip: You can also add a footer with more information, such as a link to your website, or a contact email address.
Users linking booking pages to 2 or more calendars have the option to turn off YouCanBook.me branding on their booking pages.
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Setting up your booking page - Link to selected calendars
Your booking page will list available booking times to your clients based on events already in the calendar you've integrated with YouCanBookMe. To prevent you from being double booked, we will block out any time when we find an existing busy event on your calendar.
Under Who section, select the correct calendar from your Integrated calendar account that we should be checking for conflicts. Click Edit to change the default calendar.
You may have several calendars under a single account, such as a personal and work calendar. YouCanBook.me can check multiple calendars for mutual availability, but each calendar is counted individually in your subscription costs.
Tip: Any calendar that says (read only) can be checked for conflicts, but cannot receive new bookings.
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Setting up your booking page - Check your timezone settings
YouCanBook.me will set the timezone of your booking page based on what we've detected from your linked calendar. This will influence what time bookings appear on your Google or Outlook calendar.
Under Language & Timezones inside Additional options, verify that your timezone has been detected correctly. If it is not correct for your location, you can correct this timezone setting in your Google or Outlook account, or you can uncheck Automatically detect time zone from my calendar and manually set the timezone of the booking page.
Tip: Manually setting the timezone of the booking page is not recommend if you travel often and want to take bookings according to the timezones in which you travel.
You'll also want to decide how your bookers see your available booking times.
- With Automatically detect booker timezone selected, we will display your availability relative to their location. If you are based in New York and your client opens your booking page in California, your 8 am booking time will show to them as 5 am.
- This auto-detection is based on the IP address of your booker at the time of booking.
- Uncheck Automatically detect booker timezone and everyone who opens your booking page will see the times listed in your calendar timezone, no matter where they are located.
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Setting up your booking page - Set the Booking page language
You can set the language of your booking page. Parts of the app that don't translate, you can edit manually into your target languages, such as the booking page introduction, and the labels on the questions on your booking form.
Further reading: Translating your booking page
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Setting up your booking page - Set your availability
There are two ways to set your availability for bookings in YouCanBookMe.
This setup is recommended if you offer standard working hours, and want to fill your calendar with bookings from clients:
Under When, select "Repeating" and set your working hours each day. YouCanBookMe will scan your linked calendar during these hours for any free time on your calendar, and display that time as available for booking to your clients. If you would like to block out time for booking, you can add a single break using the break feature, or you can add busy events to your linked calendar.
This setup is recommended if you offer non-standard working hours, have a schedule that varies from week to week, or want to limit the times you offer for booking:
Under When, select "Calendar Managed" and set the widest range of working hours you might possibly take a booking. Set a keyphrase you will use to identify times you're available for booking, and then take that keyphrase to your linked calendar and designate the blocks of time you want to take bookings. Only where we find blocks of times on your calendar titled with your keyphrase that are set to "Free" will be displayed for booking within YouCanBookMe.
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Setting up your booking page - Set your meeting duration
Under When, you'll configure the length of your bookings.
This will be the increments of time in which we display your available bookings. The smaller the increment, the more flexibility you can have on potential start times for your appointments.
Tip: To offer bookings at the top and bottom of the hour, set a 30 minute grid display.
Second, decide how you want to be booked:
- The option to allow bookers to choose duration will let you add more than one length for your bookings
- Alternatively, you can choose to use Appointment types, where you set the fixed length of specific services you offer.
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Setting up your booking page - Advanced meeting options
There are other settings on the Times & Availability Duration & display section you may want to enable, depending on your use case for a scheduling tool.
Start time of each booking
To set the specific start for each available spot on your booking page.
Add padding between your bookings
Padding adds buffer time between bookings you receive and between events already on your calendar. Padding can be added in any increment based on your grid display. To get a smaller amount of padding, decrease your Grid display setting.
Group bookings
This setting allows you to accept multiple bookings in a single time slot. The number set here will apply to all time slots on your calendar. It will also allow you to be booked on top of busy events in your calendar unless you indicate to YouCanBookMe to completely block out those slots.
Tip: If you set this to be greater than 1, a question will be added to your booking form "How many do you need?" Which will allow your booker to select how many slots they want to book. The label on this question can be edited to fit your use case, but if you want each booker to only take one slot, remove this question from your booking form.
Limit bookings
This setting allows you to set a maximum number of bookers to be scheduled in a day.
Fixed start and end date
This setting allows you to limit your booking to a specific time between to dates. Or you can use them individually to only affect the initial or final limits.
Custom booking notice
You will find the Minimum booking notice. This prevents people from booking last minute. The standard setting is 2 hours, but you can reduce or increase this setting. It will affect the availability displayed - no booking times will be displayed within the minimum booking notice window.
You will also see the Maximum booking notice which prevents people from booking too far in advance. The standard setting is 365 days, but you can reduce it to restrict how far in advance someone can make a booking. This is a rolling setting to the hour and will affect the availability displayed, as we will not show any booking times beyond this maximum booking notice window.
Tip: If you are using a fixed end date on your booking page, make sure your maximum booking window encompasses that end date to avoid any availability display issues.
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Setting up your booking page - Add questions to your booking form
Under Booking form in Additional options, you will see questions your client will answer after selecting a booking time, before securing the time slot. This is a good time for you to collect any information you need from them before you meet.
Standard questions on the booking form are First name, Last name, and Email. You can add, delete, and rearrange questions as needed. Each question is assigned a shorthand code which can be used to customize your confirmation emails and SMS to your booker.
Tip: If you delete the Email question, we will not be able to send any confirmation emails to your booker. If you want to send SMS to your booker, you need to add a question type "Phone number" to the booking form, and check the "Mobile phone" box.
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Setting up your booking page - Customize the After Booking page
After booking you can set either a static confirmation message that will be displayed on the screen, or you can redirect your booker back to your website or to another URL.
Customize the static confirmation message for each client using the shorthand codes from your booking form by clicking the { } in the toolbar.
Tip: Redirecting users to another URL is great for tracking purposes and Google Analytics.
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Emails & SMS - Overview
All of the notifications that trigger after a booking are housed under Notifications Actions. You can edit the standard notifications, or create your own. Paid accounts can have an unlimited number of notifications set up on a booking page.
Notifications are separated into 5 separate triggers:
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After new booking made
- Notifications created in this section will send to you and your booker as soon as they've confirmed the booking.
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If booking rescheduled
- Notifications created in this section will either trigger to you or your booker, depending on who triggers the reschedule.
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If booking cancelled
- Notifications created in this section will either trigger to you or your booker, depending on who triggers the cancellation.
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Reminders before the booking
- Notifications created in this section will send to you and your booker before the start of the meeting.
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After Appointment ends
- Notifications created in this section will send after the scheduled end time of the appointment.
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If booking marked as no show
- Notifications created in this section will send after the booking is marked as no show by the owner.
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Emails & SMS - Customize confirmation email to booker
Under the section After new booking made, you can edit the confirmation email to booker by clicking on it.
Tip: The steps below can apply to customizing any notification set to send to your booker.
1. When will this email be sent?
You can delay the sending of this confirmation email by setting how many minutes after booking the email is sent.
2. Email name
This is for you to identify the email in your Actions section. The booker will not see this.
3. From
You can change the email address sending the email to your booker. You'll need to verify you own the sending email before emails can be sent from that new address.
4. To
You can send the email to multiple people by selecting Custom Emails from the dropdown, and entering multiple email addresses separated by a comma. Everyone receiving the email will see all recipients, so you may choose to create separate notifications if you don't want the emails exposed.
5. Email subject
Customize this subject line so the email will stand out to your booker.
6. Email content
Edit the body of the email to include more information of the appointment, including where or how you will meet. Use conditional statements to display certain information based on selections your booker made in the booking. Use the toolbar to add bold or italic text, insert an image, a link, or reference any of the shorthand codes related to the booking.
Tip: When integrating Zoom with YouCanBookMe, Include the shorthand code {ZOOM} in your confirmation email to display the unique Zoom meeting link for each booker
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Emails & SMS - Set up reminder emails before the booking
Reminders before a booking are a great way to reduce no shows. You can send multiple reminders before the appointment weeks, days or hours before the appointment.
Under Notifications, navigate to Reminders before the booking. There is a default reminder scheduled to send one hour before the start of the booking. You can edit that default email by clicking on it. The formatting of this email is the same as the confirmation email.
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Email & SMS - Add additional notifications to your booking page
At any point, you can add additional notifications (Email, SMS) to yourself or your booker. Click the trigger where you'd like to add a new notification and then click the + to add a new notification.
Recommended additional notifications:
- If booking rescheduled By the booker - add a notification to your booker confirming the rescheduled appointment
- If booking cancelled By the booker - add a notification to your booker confirming their cancellation
- Reminder before booking - add a notification to yourself that the meeting is about to start
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Email & SMS - Send SMS to yourself and your booker
SMS is another way to communicate with your booker. Follow these two steps:
- Purchase SMS credits on your account
- Add the question type Phone Number to your booking form questions, checking the box "mobile phone." This field will validate that the number entered is a valid mobile number to receive SMS.
Once these two steps have been completed, you can add an SMS notification to your booker at any point under Notifications Actions.
Tip: You can also send an SMS reminder to yourself by entering your own number on the SMS notification you setup, or by using {ACCOUNT-MOBILE} and setting your personal mobile number in your Account settings.
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Advanced data options
In the Notifications section of your booking page, you can also send booking data from YouCanBookMe into other systems using a webhook, or using Zapier.
Calendar Event - Configure how the booking appears on your linked calendar
The calendar event is what we add automatically to your linked calendar when you receive a new booking. You can customize everything about that event under Calendar events.
1. Calendar event title
This is the main title of the event on your calendar. You can use shorthand codes to pull in the name of your booker from the booking form.
2. Calendar event description
This is the body of your event and will contain more detail about the booking. There's no space limit here so you are free to add as much information about the booking as you need. By default, it will be set to include the shorthand code {FORMFIELDS} which is all the information the booker added to the booking form. You can also add Zoom links, Dial in information, or any other details you want your booker to have.
Tip: Use the { } in the toolbar to access default shorthand codes, as well any any shorthand codes you've assigned to questions on your booking form. These can be included in your calendar event description to provide more details.
- If you're integrated with Zoom, you can add the shorthand code {ZOOM-LINK} to display the unique link for your Zoom meeting.
- To add cancellation and reschedule links, use the checkbox to include them in the description.
3. Invite participants to your calendar event
This feature will automatically add the booking to your booker's calendar associated with the email address they've provided. It will generate a calendar invitation email from your linked calendar account, in addition to any YouCanBookMe confirmation emails you've scheduled to send. You can manage which emails to send to the booker.
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Calendar Event - Invite another person to all of your bookings
If there are external stakeholders you want to be invited to all of your bookings, simply add their email addresses to the section Invite participants to your calendar event. They will receive a calendar event invitation generated by your calendar provider and will be added as an Optional attendee.
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Calendar Event - Control how the booking appears on your booker's calendar
With the feature Invite participants to your calendar event toggled on, a calendar invite will be sent from your calendar account to the email address your booker entered on the booking form. In addition, they will see the calendar event in their calendar the same way it appears in yours.
If you would like to turn this off, toggle off Invite participants to your calendar event, and click Booker Calendar event to customize their calendar event that they will manually add to their own calendar after booking.
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Calendar Event - Add video conference meeting link to your calendar events
If you have Zoom integrated, select Zoom as your Event location. This will add the uniquely generated Zoom link to your calendar event and to your bookers. You can also add MS Teams or Google Meet
Tip: To share a static meeting link from an alternative video conferencing tool, click Set Location and enter your link. The same link will appear in the event location on your calendar for all your bookings.
To start the video meeting simply click on the link from your calendar. Make sure you're logged into the same Zoom account that you've integrated with YouCanBookMe to be recognized as the meeting host.
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Share your booking page - How to access your booking link
There are several places in your account to access your booking link.
From your Dashboard click on the link below your booking page title. That will open your booking page in a new tab.
While editing your booking page, click on the View page button in the top-right corner. Bookmark the booking page in your browser for easy access.
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Share your booking page - Embed your booking page in your website
For a seamless brand experience, embed your booking page directly into your website, or add a Book Now button to your email signature.
View & Manage bookings - View bookings in YouCanBookMe
To view the bookings you've received in a list form, click Bookings at the top of your Dashboard.
- If you have multiple booking pages you can use the filters to see a single booking page.
- Search your bookings using the spyglass - search by booker name, email or booking REF (XXXX-XXXX-XXXX)
- Use Date Range to view bookings on a specific day.
- Export the bookings to a CSV file.
- Click on the kebab menu to the right of each booking and select Details to see more information, or to cancel, reschedule, rebook, or mark as a no-show.
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View & Manage bookings - Export bookings to a spreadsheet
Click Export on your bookings dashboard to select a date range of bookings to export into a CSV file.
- Filter by - You can select to export bookings based on the date they were created, or based on the start date of the booking.
- Between - Make sure your date range falls correctly between your selected filter.
- Include bookings from - Select the booking pages you want to get the bookings from them.
- Receiving address - you can change the email address that receives the data export.
Tip: This data export cannot be opened in Safari - please use Chrome, Firefox or Microsoft Edge.
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View & Manage bookings - Cancel & Reschedule bookings
For individual bookings, you can cancel or reschedule them using the menu next to the Details button. This will trigger any notifications you have configured when you take action on a booking.
1. Details - to see more information, or to cancel, reschedule, rebook, or mark as a no-show.
2. Rebook - will create a new appointment for your client using the same details.
3. Reschedule - will reschedule the appointment to a new date and time.
4. Cancel - will cancel the existing appointment and notify the booker.
Tip: You can mark a booking as no-show after the start of the booking up until a week after the booking has ended.
The booker can also cancel or reschedule the booking using the provided links in the confirmation email sent to them after booking. You can restrict how soon before the start of the appointment the booking can be cancelled or rescheduled.
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View & Manage bookings - Edit bookers email or phone number
You can edit the email and phone number fields on a booking, as these are necessary for communicating with the booker. If other edits need to be made, you will need to cancel the appointment and ask the client to rebook ( or rebook on their behalf).
To edit a booking, click the Details button of the specific booking, and click the pencil on the field you would like to edit.
View & Manage bookings - Make appointments for your bookers
You can make appointments on your client's behalf by:
- Visiting your booking link and booking a time for them. On the booking form, you will fill in their name email, and phone number so all relative reminders go directly to them.
- Using the rebook feature on your bookings dashboard, you can book a new appointment for an existing client using the information they initially provided during their previous booking.
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For further questions, contact our team at support@youcanbook.me.
Access your YCBM Dashboard
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