Clinic Membership lets you set online booking rules for each service, so patients can only book the appointments your clinic is happy to take. Online booking is a gift for a busy clinic. Patients book at any hour, the phone rings less and the diary fills itself. The catch is that a public calendar does exactly what it is told and nothing more. If it does not know your clinic's rules, it will happily accept a review that is far too early, a repeat booking the day after the last one, or a fifth slot of a treatment your practitioner only wants to do four times a day. Reception then spends the morning cleaning up. Good online booking rules clinic software stops those bookings before they happen, rather than leaving your team to undo them.
This guide walks through each rule you can set on a service in Clinic Membership, what it does, and how to decide which ones your clinic needs.
How online booking rules work in Clinic Membership
Booking rules live on each service, not on the whole calendar. That matters, because every treatment on your menu behaves differently. A consultation, a review appointment and a popular treatment all need different limits, and a single clinic-wide setting would never suit all three.
When you open a service, you will find its online booking rules in one place. You switch on the ones you want, set the numbers that suit your clinic, and save. From then on, the public booking calendar checks those rules every time a patient tries to book that service. If a booking breaks a rule, the patient simply cannot take that slot online, and your team is not left with a booking to unpick.
Where a rule counts days, Clinic Membership counts them from the patient's last completed treatment of the relevant type. Appointments that were booked but not completed do not reset the count.
These are your clinic's own business rules. Clinical judgement about what is right for an individual patient always stays with your practitioners.
The review window rule in Clinic Membership
Many clinics offer a review appointment after certain treatments. The problem online is timing. Without a rule, a patient can book a review on any date, including far too soon or months later than your clinic would offer one.
The Review window rule lets you say when a review service can be booked, counted from the patient's last completed treatment of the relevant type. Patients then only see review slots that fall inside the window you set. If they try to book outside it, the calendar will not offer it.
This keeps reviews where your practitioners want them and stops reception from ringing patients to move bookings that never should have been made.
Setting a minimum gap between the same treatment in Clinic Membership
Some clinics like to leave a set number of days between repeat bookings of the same treatment. That is a decision for your clinic and your practitioners, and it varies from service to service.
The Minimum gap (same treatment) rule stops a patient booking the same service again online until your chosen number of days has passed since their last completed one. Choose the gap your clinic works to, and the public calendar enforces it for you.
If you already plan timings between different treatments, our post on treatment spacing rules covers that side. The minimum gap rule here is the simple version for repeat bookings of one service.
A related rule, No adjacent same treatment, stops a patient booking the same service in back-to-back slots, which catches the odd double booking made by a slip of the thumb.
Hiding services from online booking in Clinic Membership
Another rule helps you control what patients can book on their own.
Don't show on Public booking calendar keeps a service off your online booking page altogether. It still exists in Clinic Membership and your team can book it from the calendar as normal. This suits services you only offer after a conversation, internal appointments, or anything you would rather patients asked about first.
This lets you keep the online menu short and clear while your full service list stays available to staff.
Daily caps and annual leave in Clinic Membership
Some services are popular enough to swamp a day if nobody steps in. Others need a practitioner's full attention, so your team only wants a few of them in any one day.
The Max bookings per day rule sets how many of a service can be booked online on a single day. Once the cap is reached, that service disappears from the public calendar for that date, while the rest of the diary stays open for other bookings.
There is also a Not bookable around annual leave setting, which keeps chosen services from being booked online close to a practitioner's time off. We cover how that works in our guide to annual leave buffers.
Choosing your first online booking rules in Clinic Membership
You do not need to switch everything on at once. A few habits help you get the most from the rules without making online booking feel restrictive.
- Start with the bookings reception fixes most. If early reviews are the daily headache, set the review window first.
- Agree the numbers with your practitioners. Gaps, windows and caps are clinic decisions, so set them together.
- Keep the public menu tidy. Hide any service that patients rarely book well on their own.
- Use daily caps on your busiest treatments. They protect the day without closing the diary.
- Review after a few weeks. If patients are struggling to find slots, loosen a rule. If reception is still moving bookings, tighten one.
The full step-by-step setup is in our Help guide on setting online booking rules.
Set the rules once with Clinic Membership
Online booking should save your team time, not create a second job tidying the diary afterwards. With online booking rules in Clinic Membership, each service carries its own review window, minimum gap, visibility and daily cap, and the public calendar follows them every time.
Clinic Membership brings your patients, calendar, memberships and payments together in one place. Clinic Membership is not an EMR. Clinical records live in Documenti, the EMR that works alongside it. Free covers up to 10 patient records. See pricing for paid plans.
