With Bookings, Ditch the Patchwork Approach. Just Use Decal.

A lot of what businesses sell isn't a thing on a shelf. It's time. The salon books cuts and colors back to back all day. Your personal trainer runs 1-on-1 sessions in the morning and a packed 6pm bootcamp at night. The gallery down the street opens its doors for a ticketed show on Friday.

Booking all of that usually means a patchwork: a scheduling app that doesn't know your prices, a paper calendar that double-books itself, and a phone that rings mid-appointment.

And the money is its own mess. Once someone books, you chase the payment. If they book two different things, they pay twice – and you pay the card processing fee twice. When someone reschedules or cancels, you refund the card and eat that fee all over again, paying a second time just to hand back money you already paid to collect.

Decal was built to close that gap. Your prices, your payments, and your customers' Stored Value balances already live in one place. Decal Bookings adds the last piece - time - so the thing you're selling, the single checkout it's paid in, and the credit that makes a cancellation painless all run on the same rails.

Decal Bookings turns the services, classes, and reservations you already set up in Decal Catalog into timeslots customers can grab and pay for on their own. No phone tag, no second app to run, and no processing fees stacking up every time a customer books, adds, or changes an appointment.

What Bookings can do

Bookings are where the time side of your business lives. Switch on booking for any service, class, or reservation and Decal builds a live calendar from your location's hours. A customer picks an open time, it's held the moment they do, and it's off the table for everyone else. Change your hours once and every offering's availability updates with them.

But the calendar is just the front door. The reason Bookings saves you money is what happens after a customer picks a time.

Everything they want, one checkout, one fee

Because every bookable offering lives in the same place, a customer can book completely different things in one go and pay for them together. A 1-on-1 training session and a spot in Saturday's bootcamp go in the same cart. One checkout, one payment.

Customers can book services and classes all together in one checkout

Most booking tools can't do that. Appointments and classes sit in separate flows, so the customer books one, checks out, then starts over for the other. Two trips through checkout, and you pay the card processing fee twice. Decal makes it a single customer checkout and cuts the payment fees at the same time. One cart, one payment, one fee – no matter how many different things they're booking.

That's the difference between a tool that fills your calendar and one that's actually built on your payments. Every booking that runs through Decal settles instantly and costs you less than the card rails you're used to, so a fuller calendar comes with a smaller processing bill.

When plans change, you don't pay for it twice

Plans change. People reschedule, swap a class, or cancel altogether, and on a normal card setup, every one of those is expensive. Refunding a card means paying the processing fee a second time just to give the money back, and you're often out the original fee too.

Decal handles it differently, because Stored Value is already part of the same system. Instead of reversing the card and re-exposing both of you to processing fees, you can issue the amount back as credit to the customer's balance. The money stays in your world, ready for their next booking, and neither of you pays a card fee to move it. A cancellation stops being a loss and becomes a reason for them to come back.

Rescheduling gets simpler for the same reason. The booking, the payment, and the customer's balance are one connected thing, so moving a time or applying a credit is a few taps – not a refund, a re-charge, and two more fees.

The building blocks

Availability: where your open times come from. Set your business hours and Decal slices them into bookable slots. They come in two shapes: any open time within your hours (book a 3:00, 3:30, or 4:00 haircut), or specific start times you set (the 6pm class, not "anytime between 6 and 7"). Either way, availability is always live, showing your real openings minus whatever's already booked.

Appointments or classes: how many fit. Some bookings are one-at-a-time: a haircut, a rented desk, a table for four. One booking owns that window and no one else can grab it. Others are shared, like a 10-spot bootcamp or a gallery opening with 50 tickets. Decal counts spots as they fill and closes the offering when it's full. Same system, you just set the capacity.

Control your booking settings to better manage your availability

Guardrails that protect your day. Two customers can never land on the same slot; that part's automatic. Beyond that, a few settings keep your calendar yours:

• Buffers. Breathing room between appointments, like 15 minutes to reset before the next one.

• Minimum notice. Require a heads-up before each slot, so no one books the appointment starting in ten minutes.

• How far ahead. Cap how far out people can book, so you're taking next month, not next year.

Why it matters

A tool that only fills a calendar stops there. Decal Bookings run on the same rails as your catalog, your payments, and your Stored Value, so:

• Booked and paid at once. No separate invoice and no chasing a no-show for payment. The time and the money are handled together.

• One checkout, one fee. Book a session, a class, and a reservation in a single cart and pay for all of it once, instead of running the fee up with every separate booking.

• Changes stay cheap. Reschedules, swaps, and cancellations settle as Stored Value credit instead of costly card refunds, so a change of plans doesn't cost you a second fee.

• No double-booking, ever. The instant someone claims a slot it's held, and the same time can't be sold twice.

• One source of truth. The appointment, the customer, the payment, and the catalog item are one thing. Change your hours once and availability updates everywhere.

Book more, keep more

Every booking that runs through Decal is a payment that settles instantly and costs you less than the card rails you're used to, whether it's the first booking, 3 things in one cart, or a credit for a plan that changed. So a fuller calendar comes with a smaller processing bill.

Bookings are live in the Decal dashboard now. Turn on the Bookings addon and let your calendar start paying for itself.