Bookance Appointment Booking – Booking Calendar, Staff Scheduling & Email Reminders

Description

Bookance is an appointment booking system for businesses that take bookings on their own WordPress site — salons, clinics, consultants, coaches, tutors, studios. It is built around three things.

1. It works in your page builder, natively.
The same booking form is a real Gutenberg block, a real Elementor widget (with its own category and style controls), a real Beaver Builder module and a real Breakdance / Oxygen 6 element — plus a shortcode for everything else. No iframes, no “paste this shortcode” workaround. Four layouts: step by step, single page, calendar first, or a button that opens a popup.

2. Zero double bookings, guaranteed.
Every reservation is committed inside a database transaction with a per-staff lock and a unique slot key. Two people can click “Confirm” at the same second; exactly one gets the slot and the other is offered the next free times. Chosen times are held for the visitor while they fill in their details.

3. Reminders that actually send.
Emails and reminders run through a bundled background scheduler (Action Scheduler) instead of WP-Cron alone, with retries and a log that shows every message, when it went out, and the real error when it did not. Built-in SMTP settings let you send through your own mail provider.

Everything in the free plugin

• Unlimited services, staff, appointments and customers — weekly hours, breaks and date overrides per staff member
• Step-by-step booking form: service → staff → date & time → details → confirmation, with keyboard-accessible calendar, RTL support and theme-matching design tokens (--bkc-*)
• Timezone done right: in-person services show venue time, online services show the visitor’s time; daylight saving handled automatically
• Buffers before/after, minimum notice, booking window, slot step, group capacity
• Customer self-service link to reschedule or cancel; “Add to calendar” for Google, Outlook and .ics
• Google Calendar push: every booking lands in your own Google Calendar (connect with your own Google Cloud client — no third-party middleman)
• Email notifications with merge tags for confirmation, reschedule, cancellation, reminders and admin alerts — with a send log, resend and test-send
• Built-in SMTP delivery (your own mail provider) so confirmations and reminders actually arrive; a test button shows the server’s real error if not
• Elementor Style tab with 45+ controls: every colour, font, radius and spacing of the form, per widget
• Locations with their own timezone and address; staff belong to a location and a form can be placed for one branch only
• Admin screens: dashboard, calendar (day/week/month with drag-to-reschedule), appointments (filters, manual booking, status changes), customers, services, staff & hours, locations, notifications, design, tools, settings
• Importers for BookingPress, Bookly and Amelia, plus CSV import for everything else
• CSV export of services, staff, customers and appointments, in the same columns the CSV import reads
• Privacy: WordPress personal-data export and erasure support, optional automatic anonymisation of inactive customers, clean uninstall option
• WP-CLI commands for status, seeding, availability, booking, notifications and imports

Coming in Bookance Pro

Online payments (Stripe, PayPal), deposits and coupons, two-way Google/Outlook calendar sync, SMS and WhatsApp reminders, packages, waitlists, round-robin staff assignment, webhooks and white-label. Pro is a separate plugin; nothing in this free plugin is locked.

Developers

The public REST API lives under bookance/v1. Every builder integration is a thin adapter over one PHP renderer, so adding another builder is one class. Compiled JavaScript ships with its readable source in assets/js/src. Action Scheduler is bundled unmodified under libraries/action-scheduler (GPL, the same library WooCommerce ships).

External services

By default the plugin does not send data to any third-party service. Emails are sent through WordPress’ own wp_mail(). The “Add to calendar” links (calendar.google.com, outlook.live.com) only open in the visitor’s browser when clicked.

SMTP (optional, off until you configure it). Under Bookance → Settings → Email delivery you can enter the SMTP server of your own email provider. When enabled, booking emails (or, if you choose, all WordPress email) are handed to that server instead of the host’s mail function. The credentials are stored only in your site’s database and nothing is sent anywhere other than the server you entered.

Google Calendar (optional, off until you connect it). Under Bookance → Settings you can connect your own Google account through an OAuth client that you create in your own Google Cloud project. Once connected, the plugin calls the Google Calendar API (www.googleapis.com/calendar/v3, tokens from oauth2.googleapis.com) from your server to create, update and delete events for bookings: the service name, staff name, start and end time, booking number, the customer’s name, email, phone and notes, and the manage-booking link are sent. If “Invite the customer” is on, the customer’s email address is added as an event attendee and Google emails them an invitation. Tokens are stored only in your site’s database. Google’s terms: https://policies.google.com/terms — privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy — Calendar API terms: https://developers.google.com/terms

Technical details