How to add services to your account

Learn how to add services and optimise your service management.

By Konstantin Belev

Updated 14 August, 2024

ℹ️ In this article, we'll show you not only how to add services, but how to apply buffer times, how to create dependencies with relevant resources, and how to add intervals.

What are services?

Services are all the things a customer can book with you. This could be anything from a massage, to a consultation, to a repair.
Each service you add to your TIMIFY account can be offered to your customers for online booking - but this is optional. You can quickly and easily select these services for the appointments you add to your TIMIFY calendar. All the essential service details such as the duration, the colour, and the name will drop into the appointment when you select the service.

⚙ It's easy to add services

A service can be added - and allocated to a category - by going to Administration -> Services. Just click on the “add” button to add a new service.

What’s more, you can ...

give a service description.
allocate a colour to denote the service type
set the service’s duration
allocate the resources (including employees) who carry out this service
give the service a price
make it online bookable
activate online payment.

The services you add are always available for you to select from the drop down when you go to make a new booking in your Calendar:

Plus, any services you mark as “online bookable” will appear in your Booking Widget for customers to self-schedule.

Prep and follow-up times to “buffer” services

TIMIFY allows you to add buffer times for services. Many customers like to use this function so they have a window of time to freshen up a room or space after a treatment, for example.

In this case, maybe you would add 10 minutes to clean a room and ensure the correct equipment can be brought in ahead of a 30 minute physiotherapy session. On the confirmation email, your customer will only see the 30 minute appointment time; but your TIMIFY Calendar will block out a total of 40 minutes, with 10 minutes of that time appearing slightly faded - so that you can see instantly there is a buffer time for this service.

Any time you add a service or booking, and you want to add in a buffer pre and/or post the service, simply activate the “prep and/or follow up times function” and enter the times you want.

The booking will appear something like this in your calendar:

Split a booking into intervals

It’s possible to add "gaps" to your booking, for the times when your employee and/or other resources assigned to the booking don’t need to be present. This essentially frees up your resources, and means that another booking can be made during such gaps.

For example, take a hairdresser who is highlighting a customer's hair. The hairdresser needs 30 minutes to apply the colour, after which the colour needs to be left on for another 30 minutes. This means the hairdresser has a 30 minute "gap" whilst he/she is waiting for the colour to take.

Split intervals can be activated whenever you add or edit a service:

The booking as outlined above appears in the Calendar like this:

Dependencies: link multiple resources to a service

For some services, you may need to have more than one resource type available. Let’s take the example of an optician with a team of five employees, and one consultancy room where the team carry out eye tests. This means that if a customer wants to book an eye test, not only does one of the 5 employees need to be available, but so too must the room. Here, you would add a “dependency” ensuring that both variables are available for the service to take place.

Here’s how resources - multiple employees and a single room - are selected to set up this dependency: