Help guide

Setting up

Creating an account asks for an email address and then a passkey — your fingerprint, face or device PIN. There is no password to invent. After that, setup walks through your business, your location, at least one service and your opening hours, and it remembers where you stopped, so you can do it over several sittings or from a different device.

Set the timezone to the one you actually work in. Everything else in Kalio is interpreted against it, and it is the one setting that is awkward to change later.

Services

A service is anything a customer can book: a haircut, a consultation, a class. Each one needs a name and a duration; a price is optional, and leaving it empty shows the service as priced on request rather than as free.

• Duration is the time the customer occupies. It decides how the slots on your page line up.
• Buffer is extra time held after the appointment for clearing up or writing notes. Customers never see it, and nothing can be booked into it.
• Photos are re-encoded when you upload them, which strips out the location and camera information most phones attach to a picture.
• Order is set by dragging. That is the order customers see.

When you stop offering something, archive it rather than deleting it. Archiving takes it off your booking page and keeps every past appointment intact.

Opening hours

Hours are set per weekday, and a day can have more than one block — that is how a lunch break works. A day with blocks of nine to one and two to six simply offers nothing at half past one.

Individual dates override the weekly pattern. Use an exception to close for a public holiday, or to open on a Sunday you would normally be shut, with whatever hours that day actually has.

People can keep their own hours too. Somebody who starts at eleven, or does not work Mondays, gets hours of their own; anyone without them follows the business.

Your team

Add everyone who takes appointments, whether or not they will ever sign in. Each person gets a colour, which is how you tell them apart on the calendar, and you choose which services they perform — a service with nobody assigned cannot be booked, and the services list will say so.

For any service, a person can override the duration, the price, or both. This is how a senior colleague takes longer and charges more for the same service without you duplicating your whole catalogue. Leave a field empty and it inherits.

Inviting someone by email lets them sign in and see their own schedule — their appointments and nothing else. They cannot change services, hours, prices or anyone else’s day. Invitations expire, and can only be accepted from the address they were sent to.

Booking rules

These decide what your page is willing to offer, so you do not have to decline by hand.

• Notice — the minimum time between booking and the appointment. Stops someone booking for ten minutes from now.
• How far ahead — how far into the future the page will go. Keeps people from booking next March.
• Cancellation cut-off — how late a customer may cancel themselves. After it passes, the link in their email stops working and they are asked to phone you instead.

Publishing and sharing

Nothing is public until you publish. Before that, your page cannot be found even by guessing its address, so you can build it, look at it properly, and change your mind.

The address is yours to choose, and it becomes fixed once the page is live — links you have handed out, printed or posted keep working. A completeness indicator shows what is still missing before publishing is worth doing.

Running the week

The calendar shows one week at a time, or a single day on a phone. Appointments booked online appear alongside anything you add yourself.

• Walk-ins are added straight from the calendar, at the time you tap. They skip the verification a customer goes through, because the person is standing in front of you.
• Blocked time covers everything that is not an appointment — a delivery, a dentist, a training day. Block it for one person or for the whole business, for part of a day or all of it.
• Finishing an appointment — past appointments complete on their own. Marking somebody as a no-show stays a decision you make, because only you know whether they turned up.
• The bookings list filters by date, person, service and status, and those filters live in the address bar — so a filtered view can be bookmarked or sent to a colleague. A week can be exported to CSV.

What customers see

A customer picks a service, optionally a person, then a date and a time, and leaves a name and phone number. They confirm with a short code, which is what keeps invented phone numbers off your calendar. No account, no password.

If they leave an email address, they get a confirmation immediately and a reminder before the appointment, both carrying a link that cancels it — up to the cut-off you set. A cancelled slot is free again at once.

If somebody takes the last slot while another customer is filling in their details, the second customer is told and shown the nearest alternatives, rather than being sent away with an error.

Signing in

Kalio uses passkeys, so there is nothing to type and nothing to remember. Add a passkey for each device you use — your phone and the computer at work — from the security page in your dashboard.

If you lose every device you have enrolled, ask for a sign-in link by email. It works once, expires quickly, and lets you enrol a new passkey. If a device goes missing, remove its passkey and sign out the sessions belonging to it.