Yo Booking

Yo Booking is a complete WordPress appointment booking plugin for service businesses that need a practical way to manage schedules, customers, payments, and day-to-day booking operations.

Customers can book appointments through a responsive step-by-step form, choose a service and staff member, find an available time, select an offline payment method, and manage an existing booking. Administrators get a focused booking dashboard, interactive calendar, customer records, email notifications, reports, audit logs, and maintenance tools inside WordPress.

The core plugin works without WooCommerce or an external booking service. Online payment gateways are intentionally handled through separately distributed add-ons, while the core includes Pay locally and Bank transfer methods.

Appointment booking and calendar management

• Create and manage service categories, services, staff members, and customers.
• Assign staff members to the services they provide.
• Manage appointments in list, month, week, day, and agenda views.
• Drag, drop, or resize calendar events with conflict validation and rollback.
• Filter appointments and update statuses, payments, notes, and schedules from the admin area.
• Track pending, confirmed, cancelled, completed, no-show, and rescheduled appointments.
• Export authorized appointment, customer, and report data to CSV.

Staff availability and scheduling

• Configure global business hours and individual staff schedules.
• Add multiple working periods to the same day.
• Create date exceptions for holidays, leave, closures, or special opening hours.
• Set lead time, booking window, and appointment slot intervals.
• Prevent overlapping appointments with server-side availability and conflict checks.
• Use the timezone, date format, and time format configured in WordPress Settings.

Frontend booking experience

• Add the booking form with the Yo Booking block or the [yo-booking] shortcode.
• Guide customers through service, staff, date, time, details, and review steps.
• Allow guest booking or prefill details for signed-in customers.
• Let customers select a preferred staff member or the first available option.
• Customize colors, layout density, button styling, progress steps, prices, and service descriptions.
• Preview desktop and mobile booking styles before publishing changes.
• Provide clear loading, validation, empty, success, and error states.

Customer self-service

• Add a signed-in customer portal with the [yo-booking-portal] shortcode.
• Show upcoming and past appointments with booking and payment details.
• Give customers secure token-based cancel and reschedule links.
• Enforce configurable cancellation and rescheduling deadlines.
• Allow administrators to override customer-facing booking restrictions when needed.

Email notifications and reminders

• Send emails for booking creation, confirmation, cancellation, rescheduling, completion, reminders, and payment activity.
• Customize email subjects, content, recipients, timing, and placeholders.
• Attach ICS calendar files to supported appointment emails.
• Preview templates with appointment data, send test emails, and retry failed deliveries.
• Review notification logs and process queued reminders through WordPress Cron.

Offline payments and currency formatting

• Offer Pay locally and Bank transfer during the booking flow.
• Configure bank details and customer-facing payment instructions.
• Request no payment, a deposit, or the full appointment amount.
• Track unpaid, partially paid, paid, and refunded booking balances.
• Record manual payment and refund entries with references and immutable booking totals.
• Select from the WooCommerce currency catalog without requiring WooCommerce.
• Configure currency position, thousand separator, decimal separator, and decimal precision.
• Extend payment processing through the documented provider contract for gateway add-ons.

Operations, privacy, and security

• Monitor today’s schedule, upcoming workload, booking status, payment follow-up, recent activity, and popular services from the dashboard.
• Use Booking Manager and Booking Staff roles with scoped WordPress capabilities.
• Restrict staff accounts to appointments assigned to their linked staff profile.
• Review immutable audit records for important booking, payment, customer, service, staff, and settings changes.
• Use WordPress personal data export and erasure tools for booking customer data.
• Configure data retention and run scheduled or manual cleanup tasks.
• Create password-encrypted same-site backups and restore managed booking data.
• Check booking tables and scheduled tasks through WordPress Site Health.

Integrations for developers

• Create hashed API keys with separate appointment and customer scopes.
• Use server-to-server REST endpoints for authorized appointment and customer workflows.
• Send signed outbound webhooks through a retry queue with delivery logs.
• Register separately distributed payment providers through the gateway add-on contract.

API authentication, webhook signatures, payloads, and examples are documented in docs/integrations.md. The payment add-on contract is documented in docs/payment-addons.md.

Shortcodes and Block

Booking form

Use the Yo Booking block in the WordPress block editor, or add [yo-booking] to any page.

Customer portal

Add [yo-booking-portal] to a page that is intended for signed-in customers.

Privacy

Yo Booking stores booking, customer, staff, service, notification, payment, audit, and integration delivery data in the WordPress database as required by enabled features.

The plugin does not send booking data to an external booking service by default. When an administrator configures an outbound webhook or a third-party add-on, data is sent to the endpoint or provider selected by that administrator. Site owners are responsible for documenting those destinations and their privacy terms.

Use the WordPress Export Personal Data and Erase Personal Data tools to process customer requests. Review retention settings, notification content, payment instructions, and connected integrations before accepting live bookings.