Build your menu

Your menu is the first thing that has to be true, because everything downstream reads from it. The booking page is built from it, the calendar sizes its blocks from it, the checkout prices from it and payroll pays commission on it.

It is also much smaller a job than it looks. A bookable service is four fields.

The four that matter

Everything below those four on the form is optional, and for most services it stays empty. Deposits, cancellation fees, per-service payroll deductions and add-on options are all real and all worth having later — none of them is worth holding up your menu for now.

Duration is the one people get wrong

Put in the time the chair is occupied, not the time you're actively working.

A colour that processes for 25 minutes in the middle still blocks the full 90. Processing and finishing time are described inside the duration rather than added to it, so filling them in doesn't lengthen the appointment or free the chair — it tells RewireBox which minutes of it are yours, which is what lets it find work to fit in the gap.

Get the duration right and your booking page stops offering slots you can't keep. Get it wrong and no booking rule you set later will rescue it.

Start with the ten you actually book

The temptation is to model the whole price list before letting anyone book. It's the wrong order. Put in the services you book most weeks, take a booking, and add the rest as they come up — four fields is a minute's work whenever you find something missing.

Two things worth knowing while you build it:

• Categories and fees live in Settings only. Services appear in the Apps grid under Catalog & Commerce, but Service categories and Fees are reachable only through Settings → What you sell. It is the one bit of the layout that catches everybody out once.
• Fees are not services. A sanitation charge or a card surcharge is a fee: set up once, added to a sale, never booked. If you find yourself making a service nobody would ever choose from your booking page, it's a fee.