Set up bookings

Qaema Book turns a venue into a bookable page: a barber’s chair, a clinic’s slot, a table. Everything lives on one screen at /app/bookings, and it stays editable after you publish — nothing here locks you in except the shape you start with.

What people book

The first time you open Setup, pick the business type closest to yours — Barbershop, Salon, Car wash, Clinic, Restaurant, Café, and a few more behind More. The preset only fills in sane defaults (how far ahead guests can book, whether walk-ins are allowed); every value stays yours to change afterward.

Picking a preset chooses the booking shape: a time with a person (barbers, salons, clinics, car washes), a table (restaurants, cafés, majlis), or a place (an istiraha, chalet, farm or hall, booked by the day or by the night). The shape is chosen once — if you need to change it later, contact support.

A preset can also add one extra question to the booking form. Car wash asks for the vehicle plate, with an optional free-text box for where the car is registered. Write the plate exactly as it appears on the car — any country, any emirate, any script. Nothing checks it, nothing rewrites it, and Arabic-Indic digits stay Arabic-Indic even on a venue set to Western digits, because it is a copy of an object rather than a number we calculated. It is shown back to you on the register’s bookings rail, on the order cart and on the receipt, in a fixed-width face so you can read it against the car character by character, and it never enters the signed fiscal record.

Home visit asks the guest for their location instead — a pin they drop with their phone’s location, a pasted Maps link or typed coordinates, no map required. It unlocks Zones further down this page, and the driver app your team uses on the day; see Home visits, zones and the driver app.

A place venue sets up differently. It has no services, opening hours, prayer pauses or slot rules, because each place is booked by its own blocks and priced by its own terms, all set in one Place & pricing section. Add each place under Who takes bookings. See Places, stays and halls.

Services

Add each thing a guest can book: a haircut, a consultation, a wash. A service needs a name in English or Arabic (or both), a duration in minutes, and an optional price — leave the price blank for “price on request.” Duration is what actually blocks the calendar; price is just shown to the guest.

Who takes bookings

Add the people or resources guests book against — a team member, a bay, a room, a court. Staff members come from your existing Qaema team; picking one links their bookings to their account. A bay, room or court is a Book-only row with its own name.

Each person or resource can override the venue’s opening hours for their own row — useful when one barber works a different shift than the shop.

On the Free plan you get one bookable person; upgrading adds more.

Add a court to see it on a grid on Today instead of the usual timeline, and to price it higher at busy hours; see Courts and peak pricing.

Opening hours and prayer pauses

Set the venue’s weekly hours once, the same way you would in Settings. A day can have two times, a lunch and a dinner, as in Settings; no slot is offered in the gap. Turn on Pause at each prayer to automatically block a few minutes around each of the five daily prayers — the pause length is yours to set (0–60 minutes), and the times are computed from your location pin using a calculation method you choose. Without a pin, prayer pauses can’t be computed, so set your location first: tap Use my location, paste a Google Maps link (the full link, not a shortened maps.app.goo.gl one) to fill the latitude and longitude, or type them.

Bookable slots and blocks

Four numbers shape the booking grid:

• Slots start every — how often a new booking can start (for example, every 15 minutes).
• Online booking stops — minutes before closing that are held back for walk-ins only.
• Gap between bookings — clean-up or reset time between two bookings on the same person or resource.
• Earliest booking — how soon from now a guest can book, so nobody books a slot that’s already passed.

The preview bar under these settings shows today’s timeline for one person at a glance — busy, free, a prayer pause, or the walk-in-only window near closing — built from the same rules a guest’s booking page uses.

Use Block time for anything outside the regular pattern: a lunch break, a day off, a private event. A block can cover the whole venue or just one person or resource.

Rules

Choose how far ahead guests can book (a week to three months), whether you want to confirm a booking with the guest before it’s locked in and how long before the appointment that confirmation is due, and whether walk-ins are accepted alongside online bookings. Whether you ask for a deposit — and, if you do, how long a booking that owes one holds its slot while it waits for you — is set in the Deposit section; see Deposits. A home-visit venue also sets how many days a guest’s pin is kept after the visit here; see Home visits.

Saving

Opening hours, prayer pauses, bookable slots, rules and the deposit share one Save at the bottom of the page, with the same unsaved-changes bar as Settings: only the sections you changed are written, and one that can’t be saved is named while the others still save. Adding or removing a service, a person, a zone, a blocked time or a prayer-time correction still saves on its own button.

Seasons

Ramadan, the Eids and your own seasons change your hours and prices on their own dates, and only once you apply them. About 45 days ahead, the Seasons section proposes the big ones for your type of business, with last year’s bookings behind the numbers. Bookings already made keep their price and time. See Seasons.

Publish

Your booking link is shown at the bottom of the page — copy it and share it anywhere. Nothing is visible to guests until you press Publish booking page; publishing again after edits keeps the same link. Unpublish takes the page down without losing any of your setup.