Book an appointment without leaving WhatsApp

Released 2 September 2026

A customer can now book with you inside WhatsApp — no browser, no link, no leaving the conversation. They tap a button in the chat, a form opens over the thread, and they pick a service, a date and a time.

What's new

• The form asks your diary, live. It is not a fixed form filled in when it was published. Every screen is worked out at the moment the customer looks at it: the services you sell today, the places you work from, and only the times that are genuinely still free. A slot that filled up two minutes ago is not on the list.
• A day with nothing free is never offered. The dates screen shows only days that actually have something open, so "no times available" is not a wall a customer can walk into by choosing wrongly.
• Losing the race is not a dead end. If somebody else takes the time while your customer is still typing their name, they go back to the times still free, with a line telling them what happened — not to an error they cannot do anything about.
• The "where?" question is skipped when there is one answer. A service you only offer in one place never asks it.
• Their name is already filled in if you have spoken before.
• They get the booking as a message, in the chat. The form is a sheet drawn over the conversation, so once it closes there is nothing left in the thread to say a booking happened. The moment they confirm, the booking is sent to them on your number — the time, the place, the booking code and a link to view or cancel it. It is what they find when they scroll back on Tuesday morning looking for the time.

It is an ordinary booking

Everything that happens when someone books on your public page happens here: it goes in the same diary, holds the slot the same way, sends the same confirmation email and calendar invite if they gave an address, schedules the same reminders, writes into your Google calendar if you have that on, and appears as a booking card in their chat thread. A service that needs your approval says Request sent, not You are booked, and waits for you exactly as it always did.

The one difference is that the booking is marked as the customer's own, so you can tell at a glance that they did this themselves rather than someone typing it in at the desk.

Worth knowing

• Turn it on once per WhatsApp number. It sets up the form and the security behind it, and it is safe to run again if you are not sure whether it worked.
• Check that it says the keys match. The form is encrypted between your customer's phone and WA.cr. If the two halves of that key ever stop matching, nothing anywhere reports a problem — the customer simply sees a form that will not load and tells you the booking link is broken. The setup screen says plainly whether they match, which is the one thing worth glancing at.
• A preview will not prove it works. WhatsApp's own preview shows placeholder text and never talks to your diary. Send it to your own number to see the real thing.
• The chat confirmation follows the usual 24-hour rule. Somebody who has not messaged you in a while can still open the form and still books — but their confirmation may only reach them by email. The booking itself is never affected.
• Choice lists show up to 20 rows, dates run four weeks ahead, and times are always shown in your diary's time zone rather than your customer's.