How to Use Setmore: Setup Guide From First Service to Paid Bookings

Before you start: the one choice you cannot undo

This guide takes a new Setmore account from sign-up to a Booking Page that takes paid bookings. You will add services, staff and hours, set your policies, connect payments and a calendar, and share the page. Most of it works on the Free plan ^[1], and where a step needs Pro, we say so. Have three lists ready first: your services with prices and durations, your staff with their hours, and your booking rules. Plan for an afternoon, not a week.

Then answer one question. Do you handle patient health data? If you do, stop here and create a Setmore Health account instead, because an existing account cannot be converted later ^[2]. Everything else in this guide can change after launch. That choice cannot. A clinic that gets it wrong has to rebuild the whole setup rather than flip a setting, so settle it before you type a single service name.

Create the account and lock it down

Sign up with an email address, or with Apple, Google or Facebook; no card is needed for Free. Pick an address you'll keep. Accounts created with an email address after February 23, 2026 must verify it, Pro users included, while Apple, Google and Facebook sign-ups are verified automatically. Do it now. An unverified account is the kind of small problem that stops a launch on the day. Then switch on two-factor authentication from the desktop or web app, and it applies on every device. Passkeys work on the web app, up to ten per account, though not yet in the mobile app.

Company details hold your business name, currency, time zone, social links and header image. The business hours you enter here are the hours you are open, and they are not the same as each person's working hours: customers see business hours, but available slots follow staff hours. The apps run in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese, with Android missing French. Set the time zone carefully. If you later turn on 2-way Google sync, Setmore and Google must share the same time zone first.

Build your services and classes

Services need a duration, a cost and a location. Give each one a name customers will recognize, enter the real price and time, and pick your address, the customer's address or online; a mobile groomer would choose the customer's address. You can still change the cost or duration of a single appointment later. Expect one surprise. A service only becomes bookable once you assign team members to it, so a new service that does not show up yet is usually just waiting for its staff.

Buffer time is added to the service length and hidden from customers, so a 30-minute service with a 10-minute buffer blocks 40 minutes. Set it per service and use it for cleanup, travel or notes. A therapist who books eight 50-minute sessions a day with a 10-minute buffer after each fills exactly eight hours of calendar time, by our arithmetic. That hidden buffer is what keeps a full day from running late by the afternoon.

Categories group services and tidy the Booking Page, and an accordion view lets customers expand only what they need; a salon might use Cuts, Color and Treatments. Hiding a category needs Pro. Classes run at a fixed time with several seats and close when full. You create them like services, then add sessions to the calendar, because a class only appears on the Booking Page once it is on the calendar. Classes are on both plans.

Add your team and set their hours

Seats, rooms and permissions

Free supports up to four team profiles; Pro on the web adds as many as you need, each billed separately. Every member gets a calendar and a personal booking link. Count room calendars too, since each calendar is a billed user on Pro ^[1]. A team of three stylists plus one shared calendar for the shampoo station already uses all four Free seats, so the next hire moves the whole account to Pro at $300 a year on annual billing for five users, by our arithmetic. Staff-level users see only their own calendar; owners, admins and receptionists can view team calendars. Give each person the lowest level that lets them work.

Hours, breaks and blocked time

Here is the rule behind the most common setup mistake. Available slots are based on each team member's working hours, not on overall business hours ^[3], so set hours person by person. A stylist who starts at noon on Tuesdays needs that in their own hours, or the Booking Page will offer a 9 a.m. slot nobody can take. A salon that sets only its opening hours shows every stylist as free from open to close. The first double booking usually reveals the mistake, in front of a waiting client.

Breaks block time every day, and time off covers longer absences such as vacations, so add the lunch break now. For blocks longer than 24 hours, use working hours and time off rather than events. Events handle one-off time, such as staff training or a delivery window, and can schedule custom meetings with up to 50 guests. Event time cannot be booked on the Booking Page, which is exactly why events make good blockers.

Who gets the booking

Drag team members into order under Settings, My Team. The order matters more than it looks, because when customers skip choosing a person, Setmore assigns whoever is first available in this ranking. Customers can pick a person or Any Team Member, and Skip Team Members removes the staff step entirely. Do not combine Skip Team Members with First Available Appointment, because Setmore warns it can make the page load very slowly. Pick one shortcut. Never both.

Set your rules and shape the Booking Page

Lead time, cancelations and terms

Lead time is the notice you need before an online booking, and the scheduling window limits how far ahead customers can book, such as six months. Two hours of lead time stops surprise bookings during lunch, while a window of a few months keeps customers from claiming next year's slots before prices or staff are settled. The cancelation policy can run up to one week; Anytime lets customers cancel up to the start, and Never blocks online cancelation. Pick the shortest window that protects you. Then add your terms as a checkbox customers must accept before they book, with the no-show and late rules in plain words.

Your URL, brand and labels

Your page lives at a unique setmore.com address whose first part you can customize. Choose it once. Changing it later makes downloaded QR codes stop working and stops the branded app opening for customers who installed it. The same address sits behind every Book Now button and every link you have shared, so treat it like a phone number and settle it before anything goes to print. Brand settings take a logo, a banner, hex colors, button shapes and a light, dark or system theme. Preview on desktop and mobile before saving.

You can hide service prices, durations and business hours, but hide prices only if you quote after a consultation, because most customers book faster when they see the price. Booking-step labels can be renamed, for example from Provider to Consultant, though the steps themselves cannot be removed; a law office will want Attorney instead of Staff. Customer login lets clients sign in with a one-time code and see their appointments, and Show Local Time, on by default, converts times to the customer's time zone. Our guide to the Setmore Booking Page covers the design side in depth.

Connect payments before you share the link

Connect Square, Stripe, PayPal or LawPay. All four work on both plans, and Setmore takes no cut ^[1]. Square works in the US, UK, Canada and Australia and requires identity verification before you take cards. Start that early. Stripe brings Tap to Pay and saved cards. On an $80 service paid online through Stripe, the processor keeps $2.62 at 2.9% plus 30 cents in the US, by our arithmetic, and Setmore keeps nothing. The processor you choose matters more to your margin than the Setmore plan.

Require Upfront Payment makes customers pay, in full or in part, before the booking is confirmed, and they then get five minutes to finish before the slot is released. That all but removes no-shows for new customers, and the timer stops an abandoned checkout from holding a slot. Deposits are a Pro feature, as a fixed amount or a percentage. One deposit setting covers every service, and Setmore does not refund deposits automatically after a cancelation. On a $120 massage a 25% deposit collects $30, by our arithmetic, but the same 25% would also apply to a $40 consultation. Pick a rule that works across your whole menu.

Reminders, calendars and video

Customers get an email whenever an appointment or class is booked, changed or canceled, with reminder timing from minutes to months. Free sends one reminder per booking and Pro sends two. Staff reminders are always free. Text reminders need Pro ^[4]: one text per appointment, up to 30 days ahead, with no links. Many countries cannot receive them, including Germany, France and India. A four-person Pro team receives 2,000 SMS credits a month between them, by our arithmetic, which covers one text per appointment for most small businesses whose customers live where Setmore can deliver texts.

Free syncs one way to Google, Office 365 or Apple calendars. Because the sync only runs outward, a stylist who adds a dentist appointment to Google Calendar still looks available on the Booking Page at that hour. Anyone who keeps a personal calendar should block time in Setmore or move to Pro, whose 2-way Google sync imports Google events in real time, one staff member at a time. For video, Teleport is gone and its links stopped working after September 30, 2026. Connect Google Meet per team member, for one-on-one appointments only, or Zoom, which is one-way.

Share the page, then test it

Import customers from Google or a CSV file in the web app, and make sure each one has an email address, since that is how confirmations and reminders arrive. Then share. Reserve with Google puts a Book button on your Google Business Profile in more than 80 countries; set it up from the web, desktop or iOS app, because Android cannot make the connection. Book Now buttons are free on any number of pages, Facebook pages take one too, and direct links send customers to one service with one team member already chosen, which suits ads and email signatures.

You can embed the page in an iframe pop-up or a button that floats on every page, with instructions for WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace and others. The QR code is free and downloads as a PNG, so print it only after your URL is final and put it at the front desk, where a client can book the next visit while paying for this one. Every account also gets a free branded customer app that clients add to their home screen, and the iOS, Android and desktop apps for your team are free on every plan. Before launch, run Setmore's test checklist from the public page, exactly as a stranger would:

• Book an appointment as a test customer and check the confirmation.
• Reschedule it, then cancel it, from the customer side.
• Check the staff email and the calendar entry after each change.

Running a day in Setmore

Open the calendar in Day or Team view on the web, or Agenda on mobile; Team view shows up to ten schedules side by side. The activity stream is a live feed of new and rescheduled appointments, payments, refunds and new contacts, and a manager can scan it once an hour instead of reading every notification. Phone bookings go straight into the calendar. To reschedule, drag an appointment to a new time, except appointments that came from Google Calendar, and customers get updated emails automatically. Labels mark status, from Confirmed to No-Show. Mark no-shows every time. It is the only way to see who repeats.

At the appointment, take cards with Tap to Pay through Stripe or a Square reader or Terminal, or log cash from the appointment's Payment tab. Refunds take five to ten business days to reach the customer. Recurring appointments need Pro. When you edit one, you choose between this visit and the whole series. Reports filter appointments by timeframe, service or team member and download as XLS, from the browser only, while calendar stats show confirmed income from past appointments next to projected income from future ones.

Pro adds automatic Google review requests after each appointment, and Connect, Setmore's built-in team chat, is on both plans. When you get stuck, support is human, 24/7, all year, with in-app chat replies expected within one to three minutes. Phone lines cover the US and UK, and free 30-minute demos are offered too. For a product with a free plan, that is a generous safety net. You will use it in week one.

What needs Pro, and the mistakes to avoid

Pro is needed for texts, a second reminder, deposits, recurring appointments, 2-way sync, payment links, promo codes, per-service availability, hiding categories, CC email, blocking customers, Google review requests, branding removal, the API and Setmore Health. For a team of four, the whole list costs $240 a year on annual billing, by our arithmetic. The honest test is simple. Would texts, deposits, recurring bookings or two-way sync save you more than that? Our Setmore pricing guide walks through the plans in detail.

The usual setup mistakes are easy to avoid on day one and painful to fix later, because a changed URL means reprinting and a wrong account type means rebuilding the whole setup. Each one traces back to a step earlier in this guide. A careful first hour saves a frustrating first month, so check these four before you share the link:

• Setting only business hours, so staff appear free when they are not.
• Changing the URL after printing QR codes.
• Creating room calendars that each cost a Pro seat.
• Opening a normal account for a clinic that later needs Setmore Health.

The bottom line

Setmore can be live in an afternoon: services, staff hours, a branded Booking Page, a payment processor and a calendar connection, all on Free. Set hours person by person, settle the URL before anything goes to print, and decide on Setmore Health before you create the account. Upgrade to Pro once you need texts, deposits or more than four users. Above all, test the flow as a customer before you share the link, so the first real client is not the one who finds the gap.