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A quick overview of online bookings

A quick guide to how online bookings work!

Emily avatar
Written by Emily
Updated over a week ago

What are online bookings?

Online bookings gives you the ability to let your patients book in for appointments online. Cliniko provides you with a unique bookings page that you can direct your patients to. Once you set up online booking, any patient—new or existing—can then use the online bookings! There is no need for your patients to have a log in; the booking page will collect some basic details, and match them to their existing record (if they're already a patient at your clinic), or create a new record for them.

Check out the video below to see how online bookings work!

Not sure what else online booking offers? Check out some quick details below:


Online booking & scheduling features

Not sure if it's worth setting up online booking? Here's a quick list of features that you can enable with online bookings! What are you waiting for 🤔?

  • 24/7 online bookings which reduces the time you or your team spend taking bookings over the phone 🙌! Patients can book themselves into individual, group, or virtual Telehealth appointments — no matter where they are located in the world!

  • With a few lines of code, you can embed online bookings directly into your clinic's website.

  • No company website? No problem! We provide all clinics with a unique booking URL/website that you can share & send patients directly to!

  • Cliniko is secure and monitored 24/7 and 365 days a year. If something goes wrong with online bookings, our team will jump into action straight away!

  • Support for multiple business locations and practitioners. You have full freedom over the services, business locations, and practitioners that patients can select through your online booking page.

  • No usernames or passwords for your patients to remember!

  • Online bookings works on most devices. Patients can book their appointments on their phones, tablets or computers.

  • Time zone support for your practitioners and patients! If you treat patients outside of your local clinic's time zone, you can offer appointments in their time zone.

  • You can give your patients the opportunity to pay in advance at the same time they make the booking via our Stripe integration.

  • Want to send automated appointment reminders and confirmations? Cliniko offers automated confirmation emails, email reminders, and SMS reminders!

  • If you need to collect additional information from your patients before their appointments, automated patient forms can be sent at the time of booking.

Have any questions regarding online booking features? Reach out to support team!


Can patients see my full schedule?

Nope. Cliniko will offer your patients time blocks to choose from in each morning, afternoon, and evening. If you don't have any availability at that time, nothing will be offered. If they require a time that they don't see, they would need to contact you to make a booking.


Is there anything else I should know?

A few things:

  • Cliniko has some protection in place to prevent people from booking in many appointments. There are restrictions on how many appointments can be booked from one location in a short space of time. If you are testing the feature yourself you may encounter this.

  • It is important to ensure your appointment types are set up correctly and you have the right practitioners allocated to them! This can be done in your appointment type settings.

  • The appointment availability times offered are the first available time slot in each of the different day parts (morning, afternoon and evening). We take into account the duration of the service selected. Morning is 12 a.m. to noon. Afternoon is noon to 5 p.m. Evening is 5 p.m. to midnight! 

  • Patients have the ability to download a calendar attachment to add to their own calendars (included in their confirmation emails). Keep in mind the patient will only receive an email confirmation if you have them turned on in your appointment type settings.


Online bookings are completely optional—if you don't want to allow your patients to book online, no worries! Just leave them turned off.

To find out how to set up online bookings for your account, head over here!

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