How to create Online Booking Forms & Services

1. Service Name & Service Description: these are public-facing descriptions of your Service i.e. if you opt to create an Online Booking Form for the Service, these descriptors are what customers will see in the online form and automated confirmation emails, so make sure they describe your service well.
   
   
2. Service Type: there are currently two supported Service Types:
   
   • On-site Service: services which involve your staff travelling to a site to provide a quote or service.
   • Workshop Service: services which involve customers coming to your premises.
     
     Support for "Urgent" type Services is coming soon, for Services which involve you providing an urgent/call-out type service.
     
3. Show Pricing in Online Booking page: if you're creating an Online Booking Form, tick this box if you want customers to be able to view pricing and book the Service based on this pricing.
   
   
4. Job Details: add preset details which will populate the job card for jobs created using this Service i.e. the Job Description, Work Completed Description, Job Category, and any Badges you'd like applied as default.

For straightforward services without any significant variables which might affect pricing, you can use the Fixed pricing method.

Set the Service Duration for scheduling purposes, and enter labour and materials for the Service to generate the price.

1. Service Duration: the Service duration under the Variable pricing method is 'Based on questions' i.e. you will set durations (in minutes) for various elements of the Service, and depending on which elements the customer (or your staff) select, the minutes will be totalled and used for scheduling purposes and applied to the set labour rate.    
   
   
2. Minimum Duration & Minimum Price: you can set minimum values around the price shown and duration allowed for, to ensure small jobs are still worthwhile.
   
   
3. Labour rate: you can select a Labour rate which will be applied to the duration (total minutes) of the job generated by the customer's answers. However, if your pricing method does not involve applying a labour rate (e.g. it is based on quantities or a material 'package'), you can leave this field blank and pricing will be solely determined by the questions (see Point 5).  
   
   
4. Manually approve jobs over: set a dollar limit for jobs which can be booked by customers through the Online Booking Form. If a customer's responses generate a high-value job which exceeds this limit, the form will instead direct the customer to submit an enquiry which you can review.
   
   
5. Questions: develop a series of questions which systemise the logic behind how you price and schedule this type of Service. You can:
   • ask different types of questions (e.g. Text, Multiple Choice, Numeric);
   • add time and materials to different answers;
   • set a question as being conditional on an answer to a previous question (see the green icon on the right of the table);  
   • set certain responses as a trigger for Manual Approval, in which case the form will direct the customer to instead submit an enquiry for manual review; and
   • add help text to accompany questions, to assist the customer to understand a question.

1. Booking Type: there are three scheduling options that can be presented to customers through the Online Booking Form:
   
   • Schedule a Quote: the ability for customers to browse and book a specific time for an on-site quote.
   • Schedule a Service: the ability for customers to browse and book a specific time for the Service.
   • No schedule: the Online Booking Form will not provide any potential booking times, instead prompting the customer to submit an enquiry.
     
     NOTE: when scheduling a quote or service, the possible booking times presented to customers can either be displayed as exact times (e.g. 9:00am), or booking 'windows' (e.g. 9:00am - 10:00am). This is determined by your Arrival Window settings in Settings > Preferences > Job Settings.  
     
2. Discounts for schedule optimisation: note that you can set a dollar value 'discount' incentive that may be applied to possible booking times which would optimise your scheduling, based on an algorithm which takes into account staff schedules and other job locations.  
   
   
3. Staff Assignment: add staff members who are capable of performing the Service. This is how ServiceM8 knows which staff schedules to analyse when presenting possible booking times.

At any point throughout the creation of your Service you can click the Preview button (bottom right) to open a private preview of what your Service will look like for online customers, so you can fine tune your settings.

The final step is to Publish the Service. Click Publish to enter the publishing wizard.

Choose whether to publish the Service to:

• Staff Only
  
  The Service will only be available to internal staff to apply as part of creating new jobs, in the app or online. This allows them to provide instant quotes for potential customers, and empowers office and field staff to confidently quote and schedule jobs without referring to senior staff. If this option is selected, there will be no public Online Booking Form for customers.
  
  
• Staff and Customers
  
  In addition to the "Staff Only" option, ServiceM8 will host a professional Online Booking Form for your Service, which you can link to from your website, social media, online listings and advertising.

ServiceM8 will run some pre-flight checks on your settings, and if there are no issues, you can proceed to publish the Service.

The successfully published Service will also create a list of merge fields that you can use for your email, SMS, quote and invoice templates.

Note that published Services can be edited or unpublished from the Services overview page.

You can access links for each of your Services, as well as a link for a central Services homepage for your business, by going to Settings > Self Serve Online Booking.