From treatment to a bookable service
A service connects what your practice offers with what can appear in the calendar and online booking journey. By defining its content and scheduling rules once, staff and patients work with the same current treatment.
A recognisable foundation for every appointment
When creating a service, you record its name, description, duration, price, colour and active status. Those details make a treatment recognisable when a staff member schedules an appointment or looks one up. They also give a consistent meaning to the option a patient sees while booking online. The same service therefore represents the same treatment throughout the appointment flow, without the practice having to maintain a different version in each part of the system.
The configured duration has a particularly direct relationship with scheduling because it determines how much uninterrupted space an appointment needs within a work block. The price and description provide further context, while the colour helps distinguish services in the calendar. If a treatment is temporarily unavailable, you can deactivate the service. Existing appointment data remains intact, but the service no longer appears as a choice for a new appointment.
The same rules in scheduling and booking
Not every care provider performs every treatment. For each service, you therefore assign only the providers who can deliver it. Their work blocks then determine when their permitted services are bookable. A service is not merely a description of a treatment; it is also connected to the people and working hours in which the practice can genuinely provide that treatment.
The calendar and online booking journey use those same connections. When a staff member schedules an appointment, only suitable combinations of service, provider and work block are available. A patient likewise does not see a treatment time for a provider who cannot deliver it there. The practice manages one current service catalogue for both routes: staff scheduling and patient booking use the same duration, status and provider assignments.
Practice example: scheduling a longer treatment
Consider a practice that offers a treatment requiring more time than its standard consultations. An administrator creates a separate service, enters its recognisable name and description, and records the longer duration, price, colour and active status. The service is then assigned only to the care providers who perform that treatment. Within their work blocks, the practice can indicate when it may be scheduled or offered for online booking.
When a patient chooses this treatment, Tempo Booking does not look for just any free start time. The complete configured duration must fit inside an allowed work block, with enough uninterrupted space available. Only then can the time appear for an assigned provider. If the treatment later becomes temporarily unavailable, the practice deactivates the service. New choices disappear while information attached to appointments that already exist is preserved.