---
title: "How Bookings Work in ScanQueue: Online Booking Built Into Your Queue"
slug: how-scanqueue-bookings-work
date: 2026-07-23
author: ScanQueue Team
author_role: Queue Management Experts
category: retail
category_label: Retail & Services
read_time: 8 min read
excerpt: "A complete walkthrough of booking in ScanQueue: the customer booking page, the staff calendar, the rules you control, the six automatic messages, and what happens when someone cancels."
canonical_url: https://www.scanqueue.com/blog/how-scanqueue-bookings-work
---

**Most walk-in businesses end up running two systems: a queue for the people standing in front of them, and a separate booking tool for the people who planned ahead.** The two never talk to each other, so a booked customer arrives to find four walk-ins already ahead of them, and a cancelled slot at 2pm just quietly disappears.

Booking in ScanQueue is built the other way around. A booking is not a separate kind of thing living in a separate calendar. It is the same record as a walk-in, just with a time attached. That one decision is why check-in, wait estimates, notifications and reports all keep working when you add bookings on top of an existing queue.

This is a walkthrough of the whole feature: what your customers see, what your team sees, the rules you control, the messages that go out, and what happens when someone cancels.

## From link to check-in, in three steps

1. **You share a booking link.** Every business gets a booking page at its own address. Put it on a QR code, in your Instagram bio, on your Google listing, or on the sign by the door.
2. **Your customer picks a service and a time.** On their own phone, in their browser. No app, no account, no password.
3. **Your team checks them in when they arrive.** One tap moves them from the booking calendar into the live queue, and everything downstream behaves exactly as it does for a walk-in.

## What your customers see

The booking page walks through three short steps: service, date and time, then details.

![ScanQueue booking page on a phone showing a 14-day date strip, the selected date, and a grid of available time slots with already-booked times crossed out](/booking-customer-slots.png) 

Times already taken are struck through, so nobody picks a slot that has gone.

A few details worth calling out:

- **Slot length comes from your service.** A 30-minute haircut produces 30-minute slots. You do not configure slots separately.
- **Customers can pick a chair, room or staff member** if you use counters, or leave it as "Any".
- **Times are shown in your timezone,** stated on the page, which matters more than you would think for anyone booking while travelling.
- **The details form is the same one** you already customised for walk-ins, including any custom fields you added.
- **The confirmation page is their ticket.** They can come back to that link later to reschedule or cancel themselves, with no phone call to you and no account to log into.

There is also a link at the top of the booking page for people who want to come in now rather than book ahead. It drops them straight into the walk-in queue. That one link removes a surprising amount of phone traffic.

## What your team sees

Turning bookings on adds a **Bookings** tab next to your live queue. It is a day and week calendar with a column per chair, room or counter.

![ScanQueue staff dashboard showing the Bookings tab with a day calendar, two chair columns, six scheduled bookings, and counts for scheduled, in queue, served, no-show and cancelled](/booking-staff-calendar.png) 

The day view, with each booking on the chair it belongs to and the party size shown on the block.

From here your team can:

- **Check someone in.** The booking becomes a live queue entry at the back of the current queue, with a wait estimate. If they turned up very early, you get a confirmation prompt first.
- **Add a booking by hand,** for the customer who called or walked in to book for next Tuesday.
- **Drag a booking to a different time or chair** on the desktop calendar, or reschedule it from the detail panel.
- **Set up a repeat booking** that runs weekly, every two weeks or monthly for a set number of visits. When you cancel one, you choose whether it applies to that booking, that booking and everything after it, or the whole series.
- **Watch it update live.** New bookings and status changes appear on every open screen without a refresh, so the front desk and the floor stay in sync.

Bookings also flow into your existing reports. Served, no-show and cancelled counts include booked customers, so you are not looking at two different versions of your day.

## The rules you set

All of it lives in one panel in Settings, and every business runs differently, so most of it is a switch rather than a decision we made for you.

![ScanQueue Booking Settings panel showing toggles for bookings, letting customers book online, standby list, walk-in wait adjustment, plus fields for no-show grace period, minimum notice and booking window](/booking-settings.png) 

The whole control surface for booking, on one screen.

- **Let customers book online.** Turn this off and you keep the Bookings tab for your own team while your public page shows the waitlist only. Useful if you take bookings by phone.
- **Standby list when full.** When a day is completely booked out, customers can join that service's queue as a standby list instead of bouncing off a dead end.
- **Adjust walk-in wait estimates.** Off by default. Turn it on and the two sides become aware of each other, which we cover below.
- **No-show grace period.** How long after the booked time before the booking is marked as a no-show automatically.
- **Minimum notice.** How far ahead someone has to book. Zero means they can take the next slot going.
- **Booking window.** How far into the future customers can book. Raise it if you are selling timed entry weeks out.
- **Opening hours,** set per weekday with multiple windows for a lunch break, plus date-specific exceptions for public holidays and one-off closures.

Booking is also enabled per service, so you can take bookings for colour appointments while keeping fringe trims walk-in only. How many people can book the same slot comes from the service's own capacity, so if you already told ScanQueue you have three chairs, three people can book 10am.

## Six messages, in your words

Reminders are the whole reason booking systems reduce no-shows, so there are six of them across the life of a booking:

| Message              | When it goes out                                   |
| -------------------- | -------------------------------------------------- |
| Booking confirmation | Straight after they book                           |
| 24-hour reminder     | The day before                                     |
| 1-hour reminder      | An hour out                                        |
| Short reminder       | Shortly before the time, for people already nearby |
| Running-late nudge   | Once they are into the grace period                |
| Missed appointment   | When the booking is marked as a no-show            |

Every one of them can be reworded in Settings using variable tokens, or switched off entirely. A dental practice and a tattoo studio should not sound the same, and a "you are late" text is exactly the sort of message that needs to be written in your own voice.

Where a customer is reachable on WhatsApp, booking messages go by WhatsApp and fall back to SMS automatically if that fails, so a delivery problem on one channel does not turn into a missed appointment.

## When someone cancels, the slot refills itself

A cancellation two hours before is not really a cancellation problem. It is an empty-chair problem. Somebody is usually sitting in your waiting area at that exact moment who would happily take it.

**Smart Rebook** handles that. When a booking is cancelled or moved and the freed slot is within the next few hours, ScanQueue looks for walk-ins who are waiting right now, are queued for the same service, and would genuinely be seen sooner than their current estimate. Those customers get a text with a tap-to-claim link. The first person to tap it takes the slot and the rest are told it has gone, so there is no double booking and nobody is forced out of the walk-in queue against their will.

The standby list works from the other end. If someone lands on a fully booked day, they can join the queue for that service as standby instead of leaving, and you call them the way you call anyone else.

## Bookings and walk-ins that know about each other

By default, bookings and walk-ins run side by side without interfering. That is deliberate: if you are adding bookings to a queue that already works, nothing about your walk-in wait times should change on day one.

Turn on **Adjust walk-in wait estimates** and the two become aware of each other in both directions:

- Walk-in wait times account for the capacity that upcoming bookings have already taken, so a walk-in who joins at 10am is not quoted 20 minutes when three booked customers are due in that window.
- Booking slots account for the walk-ins currently queued, so nobody books 10:30 when the shop realistically cannot clear its walk-ins before 11.

This is the part a standalone scheduling tool structurally cannot do. A calendar that has never heard of your walk-in queue will keep selling slots your team has no capacity for. There is a fuller comparison in our [virtual queue versus appointment booking](/blog/virtual-queue-vs-appointment-booking) guide.

## How different businesses use it

- **Barbershops and salons.** Regulars book their usual chair and their usual barber, often as a repeating series, while the walk-in queue keeps running for everyone else. Our [guide to managing barber walk-ins](/blog/manage-barber-walk-ins) covers the queue side.
- **Clinics and consultations.** Different appointment types get different lengths, and the automatic reminders do most of the work on no-shows.
- **Restaurants.** Bookings for tables, walk-ins on the list, one view of the room, and a party size on every booking.
- **Events and timed entry.** Raise the booking window and sell timed slots weeks ahead, then use the standby list to soak up demand on sold-out days.

## What booking does not do

Worth being straight about, because it decides whether this fits you:

- No deposits or prepayment at the time of booking, and no automatic no-show or late-cancellation fee.
- Opening hours are set for the business, not per staff member, so individual rosters and days off are not modelled.
- No configurable buffer between bookings. Padding, if you need it, goes into the service duration.

If taking money up front is the main thing you need, a dedicated salon-payments platform is a better fit. If your real problem is that walk-ins and bookings are fighting each other, this is built for exactly that.

## Getting started

Booking is included on the [Growth plan](/pricing) and above. If you already run your walk-in queue on ScanQueue, switching it on is four steps: check your service durations, set your opening hours, enable booking on the services you want, and share the link.

If you are new here, [start with a free account](/signup) and get the walk-in queue running first. Bookings make much more sense once the queue underneath them is real. When you are ready, our [guide to running walk-ins and appointments in one queue](/blog/walk-ins-and-appointments-in-one-queue) covers the operational side of the switch.