How bookings work
Slot holds, deposits, confirmations and the manage links patients use to reschedule or cancel.
The patient's journey
A patient books in five steps: appointment type → location (multi-site practices) → practitioner (or "any", which resolves to the first free clinician) → a date & time from the live availability → their details. What happens next depends on the appointment type:
- No deposit, no confirmation — the appointment is booked instantly and the booking confirmation message goes out.
- Deposit — the chosen slot is held for 60 minutes while the patient pays through Stripe Checkout. Payment converts the hold into a booking; walking away releases the slot automatically (30 minutes for no-deposit types that stall at the details step).
- Practice confirms — the booking lands as a request. Your team approves or declines it from Today; the patient's confirmation and reminders only go out on approval.
Held slots are invisible to other bookers, so two patients can never take the same time — a slot that's snapped up mid-checkout answers "that time is no longer available" and offers the picker again.
Patients browse live slots in two-week pages for the next 14 weeks. When a connected practice-management-system location has more than 10 linked practitioners, the patient must choose a practitioner before SmileLine queries the provider diary; the unbounded Any practitioner search is unavailable.
What lands in the CRM
Every booking — completed or abandoned — creates or matches the patient by email/phone, stamps the configured lead source, and records an attribution touch with booking as the channel. A booking started from AI chat continues the conversation's active journey when the matched patient and the appointment type's default treatment both agree; otherwise SmileLine opens the normal new journey for that treatment. Instant bookings appear on the Calendar immediately; abandoned holds cancel themselves and leave the lead behind with a Call now card.
Confirm-mode requests raise a Confirm online booking card on Today: open it, and approve (the patient's confirmation goes out, reminders arm) or decline with a cancellation reason.
A deposit that settles after its hold expired is never lost: if the slot is still free the booking revives automatically; if it was taken, a Deposit paid but the slot was lost task tells your team to call and rebook — the money stays on the deposit, ready to refund or reallocate. Once that review exists, cancelling its task never revives the old appointment; staff must explicitly rebook or refund.
Deposits
Booking deposits ride the same Stripe Connect account and lifecycle as staff-sent deposit requests: the paid deposit shows on the patient record, auto-refunds when the consultation is attended, and follows your no-show policy otherwise. Cancelling an unpaid hold voids its payment link; a paid deposit on a patient-cancelled booking stays on the account for your team to refund or forfeit.
If a required deposit cannot be taken because Stripe or the connected account is unavailable, SmileLine disables that appointment type and does not create a free booking. The patient can try again later or contact the practice. Staff may separately record money collected at the practice.
When a PMS appointment operation has started, the manage link becomes read-only and the patient is asked to call the practice. This applies while the provider outcome is still reconciling as well as after confirmation, so an ambiguous provider booking can never reappear after a local-only cancellation. Expiry rejects provider work that never activated. Once a live hold has been claimed, cleanup retains it while the provider outcome reconciles. If the provider booking completes after the original request disconnects, SmileLine finishes the local booking in the background; an irreconcilable provider/local conflict creates an urgent review task instead of repeating the provider booking.
Manage links: reschedule and cancel
Confirmation and reminder messages carry a manage link (the {{appointment.manageUrl}} merge tag). From it, patients can:
- see the appointment's status, time, practitioner and location;
- reschedule — pick a new time from live availability; the deposit carries over;
- cancel — with an optional reason; scheduled reminders stop and your cancellation message goes out.
Both actions respect the appointment type's minimum notice: inside the cutoff, the page shows your practice phone number instead. Manage links work for staff-booked appointments too, so every reminder becomes a self-service reschedule surface — appointments owned by a connected practice management system are the exception (view-only; patients are asked to call).