Services
Time you sell over a calendar: appointments vs multi-day stays, duration, capacity, availability, staff, deposits, cancellation and reschedule policy, and multi-day check-in/out.
A service sells time and capability: the customer reserves a slot or a date range, a person or a space is committed, and you deliver value over that time. Haircuts, consultations, classes, hotel stays, rentals, venue hire. You model it as a product of type Service.
If the service ties up a physical thing while it happens — a room, table, chair, court, or vehicle — read Bookable resources alongside this page. That's where most of the subtlety lives.
The first decision: appointments or multi-day?
The single biggest service choice is the scheduling mode:
- Within a day (intraday) — booked as time slots inside a day: a 30-minute haircut, an hour consultation, a fitness class at 6pm. Cimplify generates bookable slots from your opening hours and the service duration.
- Multi-day — booked as a span of days: a hotel stay, a three-day van rental, a week of co-working, a weekend venue hire. Cimplify reasons in nights or days with check-in and check-out, not minute slots.
This choice must match the duration unit, and Cimplify enforces it:
| If the duration is in… | the mode is… |
|---|---|
| minutes or hours | within a day |
| days, nights, weeks, months, years | multi-day |
For agents: set scheduling_mode to Intraday or MultiDay, and duration_value + duration_unit (e.g. 2 + Nights). They must be coherent — Nights cannot run intraday. Prefer duration_value/duration_unit over the legacy duration_minutes.
Duration and capacity
- Duration — how long one booking lasts. A specific variant can override it (a "full set" manicure taking 60 minutes where the base is 30).
- Capacity — how many participants one slot holds. A 1:1 consultation is 1; a yoga class might be 20.
Capacity is a headcount, not a set of real units. A plain capacity number is right when there's nothing physical to assign — a class with 20 spots, a walking tour. The moment specific rooms, tables, or vehicles are involved, a number can't tell you which one, can't keep two room types from sharing a pool, and can't be assigned at check-in. Then you need bookable resources, not a capacity number.
Buffers and prep round this out: preparation time before a booking starts, and buffer before/after for turnaround. These block the calendar around the booking without being billable time — clean-down between salon clients, room turnover between stays.
Availability: when can people book?
Availability is defined per location in two layers:
- Weekly rules — your recurring opening windows: "Mon–Fri 09:00–17:00", each with an optional capacity override. For multi-day services, a rule also controls whether a new stay may start on that weekday — useful for a hotel that's open every night but takes no Sunday check-ins.
- Exceptions — one-off overrides: a public holiday (closed), a special event with different hours, or a date range with reduced capacity. An exception can cover a single day or an inclusive range.
A slot is bookable only when a weekly rule opens it, no exception closes it, and (where required) staff and resources are free.
Staff
If the service needs a person, mark it as requiring staff and add a staff requirement: how many staff, optionally limited to a role or a skill, and whether any qualified person is fine or a specific person must be chosen. Each staff member has:
- their own availability (weekly working hours plus time-off exceptions),
- a booking profile: skills, a personal duration override, a personal buffer between bookings, a daily booking cap, and whether customers can pick them directly.
Use this anywhere the booking is really booking a person's time — salons, clinics, tutoring, consulting.
Policies
Services carry the money-and-trust rules. Set the ones you actually enforce; leave the rest off.
| Policy | What it does |
|---|---|
Deposit | Take payment up front: none, a fixed amount, or a percentage of the total. |
Cancellation window | How long before the start a customer can cancel free. Inside it, the cancellation fee / partial refund applies. |
Cancellation notice (days) | The multi-day version: days of notice required for a free cancellation. |
No-show fee | What's charged when a customer never arrives. |
No-show grace period | Minutes after the start before a booking is marked a no-show. |
Partial refund % | How much is refunded for a late cancellation inside the window. |
Free reschedules + fee | How many times a booking can be moved free, and the fee after that. |
Early-termination fee + pro-rata refund | Multi-day: a fee for leaving early, and whether unused time is refunded. |
Multi-day stays in detail
Multi-day services add a vocabulary layer so the booking reads correctly:
- Check-in / check-out time — the time of day a stay begins and ends (in from 15:00, out by 11:00). These are times of day, not full dates.
- Minimum / maximum stay — length limits in the duration unit (at least 2 nights, at most 30).
- Handover wording — choose the language: check-in / check-out (hospitality), pickup / return (rental), delivery / collection, access / vacate (space), move-in / move-out (furnished), or your own custom labels. This only changes wording, not behaviour, but it makes the booking read right to staff and guests.
A multi-day service almost always sits over a bookable resource — the actual room or vehicle. Model the resource pool first, then the service that books it.
Services that use materials
A service can consume stock as it's delivered — hair colour uses dye and developer; a treatment uses supplies. Add a recipe of ingredients to the service exactly as you would for food. Service and food share the same consumption bridge, so a haircut-with-colour deducts dye while it books a stylist's time.
Worked examples
A haircut. Service, within a day, 45 minutes. Requires a stylist (any qualified, or a specific one the customer picks). Deposit optional; cancellation window a few hours; a no-show fee.
A yoga class. Service, within a day, capacity 20, no resource needed. Weekly rules for the class times. No staff requirement unless you assign instructors.
A hotel room night. Service, multi-day, nights, min-stay 1, check-in 15:00 / check-out 11:00, handover wording "check-in/check-out", over a room resource type. Deposit and a cancellation-notice policy.
A consultation that needs a room and equipment. Service with both a staff requirement and a resource requirement; both are checked before the slot is offered.
Mistakes to avoid
- Using a capacity number where real units exist. See the warning above and bookable resources.
- A duration unit that contradicts the mode (nights with intraday). Cimplify will reject it; set them coherently.
- Forgetting availability rules, so no slots ever generate.
- Putting materials a service uses into "notes" instead of a recipe, so stock never deducts.
Common questions
Can a service have no staff and no resource? Yes — a self-service or capacity-only offering (a class, a tour) just needs a duration, capacity, and availability.
How do deposits get collected? The deposit policy on the service decides what's taken at checkout; the rest is the balance. Deposits are independent of the scheduling model.
Can prices or availability differ by location? Yes. Availability rules are per location, and prices can be set per location.
What's the difference between capacity and a resource, really? Capacity is "how many people fit". A resource is "a specific thing that gets used up and assigned". 20 class spots = capacity. 5 specific massage rooms = resources. If you'd ever say "put them in room 3" or "room 3 is closed today", you need resources.
I'm an agent. What's the minimum to make a service bookable? A service product with a scheduling mode, a duration, and at least one weekly availability rule at a location. Add capacity, staff, resources, and policies as the business needs.
Next: Bookable resources — essential for any service tied to a physical room, table, court, or vehicle.
Food
Things you make from ingredients: recipes, sizes that use more, waste, modifiers and build-your-own, allergens, and the kitchen workflow. Also covers light manufacturing.
Bookable resources
Rooms, tables, vehicles, courts, chairs, parking, spaces. How to model the physical thing a booking occupies — the three consumption modes, assignment timing, and when a capacity number is a trap.