Turn on online booking

Settings → Schedule & booking → Booking. Optional. This gives your clinic a public page where patients can ask for an appointment.

Requests, not bookings

This is the important part, and it’s deliberate: a patient cannot put themselves in your calendar. What they submit is a request, and it waits in a staff inbox until someone approves it.

It isn’t even a patient record yet. A request sits in a holding area of its own — nobody joins your patient list, and nothing appears on the calendar, until a person on your team says so. No stranger takes your 9am. The alternative — letting the public write directly into a clinical schedule — is how a Monday morning gets ruined by someone who booked a root canal for a cleaning slot.

Before you turn it on

Booking reads directly from what you set up earlier, so check these first or the page will offer nothing:

• Dentist working hours — no hours means no slots
• Which visit types patients may request, and how long each takes
• Your logo — the booking page is public, and it’s your shopfront

Steps

1. Go to Settings → Schedule & booking → Booking.
2. Turn booking on. It’s one switch for the whole clinic, not one per branch.
3. Set your visit types — the reasons a patient can pick from, and how long each one needs. This is its own short list (“Checkup & Cleaning”, “Toothache / Emergency”, and so on), separate from your price list. Rename them to your words, switch off the ones you don’t want offered, and add your own.
4. Copy your booking link and put it where patients already are — your Facebook page, your Instagram bio, your Google listing, the auto-reply on your Messenger.

Handling requests

Requests land under Appointments → Requests, one inbox per branch.

Approving asks who this is. If the person is already in your records the app suggests the match; if they’re new it creates the patient record from what they typed. Either way you pick the dentist and the real time, and it books like any other appointment — scheduled, not yet confirmed, exactly as if your front desk had entered it.

If the patient left an email address they’re emailed automatically. Many patients only leave a mobile number, so treat that email as a bonus rather than as how they find out — the call you’d normally make is still the call to make.

Decline it and nothing was ever on your calendar.

Check it like you check messages — a request that sits unanswered for three days is a patient who has already phoned somewhere else.

Next: check your patient emails.