September 2026: Put Your Booking Steps in Your Own Words

Add photos to a service and clients see them while they choose what to book: a thumbnail beside the service in your booking list, and the full set when they open it. Maximum of 10 images per service. The first image is the one clients see in the service list, so drag to reorder and decide which one leads. Bundles need no photos of their own: they automatically show a lead image from each of their included services. The Images tab sits at the end of a saved service, after Variants.

Building the same cut at 30, 45 and 60 minutes meant filling the same form in three times. Now the three-dot menu on a service has Duplicate, and the copy opens in the editor ready to rename. It carries everything: price and duration, variants, pricing tiers, the team members and resources it is assigned to, its booking and cancellation policies, its photos, its prerequisites and its add-on groups. It lands directly below the original rather than at the bottom of the category. Add-on groups have the same Duplicate, options and links and all.

A group linked to a service can be offered only for the variants you tick, so a long-hair extra does not appear when a client books a short cut. Existing groups stay on All variants.

The service CSV import now carries three more columns: processing time, buffer before and buffer after. So a colour with 45 minutes of development time and a 10-minute clean-down comes in ready to book, without editing each service by hand afterwards. Leave a column blank to use your business default; the same everyday formats as Duration work (45, 45 min, 1h 30m).

The product CSV import now carries your inventory too: a Manage inventory column and a Stock quantity column, so a catalogue arrives already counting units instead of every product landing untracked and needing to be opened one by one. If your export has a stock column but nothing saying which products you track, Bella reads the count as the answer and turns tracking on. The same import also finally carries the Available online column it had always offered to match.

The Products list shows stock value at cost (quantity times purchase cost) and a Totals row for the catalogue you are viewing. Click Stock value to sort highest first. Export CSV includes that column as a number you can sum, plus the same total. Untracked products and products with no purchase cost are left out. Reports > Products sales is what sold in a period, not what is on the shelf.

A package expiry used to be a whole number of months, so a one week intensive had to be sold as one month and gave away three extra weeks on every sale. Now the expiry period has a unit beside the number: days, weeks or months, or no expiry at all. Pick it per package, and set the default your new packages start on under Settings > Packages. Everything you already sell keeps the months it has, and the expiry on a package already sold never moves.

When a client does not choose a team member, the booking goes to whoever has the fewest bookings that day. A client who picks someone still gets that person, and that booking counts, so the next open booking goes to someone else. Several guests at once each get a different team member. The name under a time is the person that time would be booked with. The times stay in order, and Schedule gaps is unchanged.

A new choice under Settings > Payments > Payment policy > When a client books online. With Pay to book, an online booking is not on your calendar until the deposit is paid: the time is held for 30 minutes while the client pays, other clients cannot take it, and if they walk away the hold lapses quietly and the booking appears under Incomplete bookings as Stopped at payment. Book now, pay within a window keeps today's behaviour, and now shows the release time on the calendar chip, the appointment panel and your notification. A second setting, Deposit applies to, lets you keep deposits for online bookings only, so appointments your team creates never ask for one. New accounts start on Pay to book. Businesses already requiring a deposit were left on Book now, pay within a window until they choose to switch; every other existing business is on Pay to book, so it applies from the day they turn deposits on.

The Card on file payment policy now holds the time the way Pay to book does, with nothing to switch on and no dependence on the deposit setting beside it. A client booking online with no saved card creates no appointment: their time is held for 30 minutes while they save one, nobody else can take it, and a team member who tries to book over it is told what the held time is waiting for. Nothing is charged at any point. The card is saved so you can charge a late-cancellation or no-show fee later if your cancellation policy applies, and saving it creates the appointment, already confirmed. If the client walks away the hold lapses quietly: nothing was ever booked, so nothing is cancelled and no appointment message goes out. The lead lands under Incomplete bookings as Stopped at card, where it gets your usual abandoned-booking follow-up: the bell, and the Incomplete booking reminder if you have it switched on. A client who already has a card saved is never asked again. A card asked for by a service or membership override, or a booking carrying products you take full payment for, still creates the appointment first and waits as Awaiting Card.

Members-only services have always appeared on your booking page with a Members only lock, inviting non-members to join. A new switch under Settings > Online booking > Appearance lets you hide them from the booking page instead: the service list and its search, bundles, shared links, saved and rebooked carts, and the page's search-engine data all drop them for anyone whose own membership doesn't cover them, and the gift card page stops offering them to anyone. A covered member still sees and books them as usual, and your team can always book them from the scheduler.

A new Appointments per day setting under Settings > Booking policies stops online booking piling a tenth appointment onto a day you can only comfortably do eight of. Once a day reaches your number it offers no more times on your booking page, and your team can still book that day from the Scheduler. A booking counts as one appointment however many services or people it covers, and cancellations and no-shows hand the capacity straight back. Pair it with your waitlist and a full day captures demand instead of turning clients away. The availability figures on the settings page show what a limit would cost you before you save it.

Every cap that only existed because a number had to be picked has been raised. Your booking page gallery holds 30 photos (was 10) and each service 10 images (was 5); a form question takes 10 files (was 5); a loyalty programme holds 50 rewards (was 20); gift cards allow 30 custom designs (was 10) and 20 preset amounts (was 10), the same 20 for client credit top-up amounts and bonus tiers; and an online order can carry 20 units of a product across 30 lines (was 10 and 20). Photos are still optimised on upload and load as the client scrolls, so a fuller page costs nothing. Limits that protect something specific, such as 20 API keys or 5,000 rows per import, are unchanged.

The booking wizard itself is now customisable: the Services, Team member and Date & time step headings, each step's subtitle, and the Continue button label can be reworded under Settings > Online booking > Appearance > Booking steps. Blank fields keep the standard copy, and the Review & book step keeps its own fixed heading and button.

Your booking page now publishes both, at yourbookinglink/terms and yourbookinglink/privacy, filled in with your business name and contact details. They cover what booking with you involves, what you collect, who it goes to and how a client stops your messages, and they are linked under the phone number field where clients sign in. Nothing to write and nothing to switch on. If you already have your own, put the links under Settings > Business settings and yours are used everywhere instead, including on your text-verification application in the US and Canada, where carriers now require both.

Add your own terms of service link under Settings > Business settings and clients are asked to agree to them on Review & book. The booking waits until they turn the switch on. Bella records which terms they accepted and when, so you have the evidence if it is ever questioned, asks once instead of every visit, and asks again only if you change the link. Setting the link is the intent. Businesses using the terms Bella provides are not asked to accept anything.

The wording about your appointment texts has moved to where clients actually give their number: right under the phone field when they sign in, naming your business, what you send, how often, the usual carrier notes and how to stop. Review & book keeps the optional offers and promotions switch, off until a client turns it on. Book appointment is never greyed out waiting for a messaging control. Returning clients no longer re-confirm anything to book, and the screenshot your text verification needs is captured from that sign-in step for you.

Your public booking page publishes a structured listing of your business: the type you run, your name, the address, hours and contact details you chose to show, and your published Bella reviews. Search engines and AI assistants can read that listing. When you have at least one published review on the Professional plan (and during trial), those reviews also have their own page at yourbookinglink/reviews.

The calendar subscription URL on a team member now includes their appointments from the past year through the next year, so a name search on the phone still finds clients from the last 12 months. Calendar apps refresh on their own schedule. Appointments older than a year, and cancelled ones, leave the subscribed calendar on the next refresh. Google Calendar sync is unchanged: past appointments it has already pushed stay on Google.

A campaign used to tell you that two people unsubscribed and one bounced without telling you who. The recipients table now names them: every row on an email campaign shows what that client did once it landed, and a new Engagement filter narrows the list to just the ones who unsubscribed, bounced, opened, clicked or marked it as spam. A bounce brings the reason with it, so a dead address reads differently from a mail server having a bad morning. Export saves whatever you are looking at. It works on every campaign you have already sent, not only new ones.

A loyalty reward no longer has to be money off. Under Settings > Loyalty, each reward's Benefit type now offers Free item beside Percentage off and Amount off: pick a service, a bundle or a product and give it for the points, outright or at a discount. Name more than one and the client gets one of them, the dearer one if they book two; a bundle counts as a single item, so a free bundle covers every service in it. The reward comes off the bill when that item is on it, and the till greys it out until it is, saying what to add. Free products can be redeemed on a walk-in sale as well as at an appointment, and a refund hands the points and the stock back. Points are only ever spent on a reward that gives something: a reward that would take nothing off the bill is refused, and the client keeps their points. Percentage-off rewards are new too, and every existing reward carries on exactly as it was.

A birthday reward no longer has to be money off. Under Settings > Birthday, Benefit type now offers Free item beside Percentage off and Amount off: pick a service, a bundle or a product and give it outright, or at a discount if you would rather. Name more than one and the client gets one of them, the dearer one if they book two; a bundle counts as a single item, so a free bundle covers every service in it. The gift applies when that item is on the appointment, so a free facial comes off the bill the moment it is booked; if it is not on the appointment, nothing is discounted and the gift stays waiting. Your team sees a prompt at the till offering to add it, and the client sees the same prompt in their online booking. The birthday messages follow: RewardAmount now reads "a free Express Facial" as happily as "20%", and a new BirthdayGift merge field writes the whole sentence for you, expiry included.

Plenty of businesses book every appointment in Bella and take payment on their own terminal or in cash, without ringing the appointment through Checkout. Their dashboard used to open on Total revenue of zero and an empty revenue chart. Now the dashboard reads how you trade: if you rang your appointments through Checkout in the selected range, the money cards are Total revenue and Avg sale value from your sales, as before. If you did not, they become Appointment value and Avg appointment, the value of what you booked, and the Services by category chart uses the same basis. Your weekly digest, the location stats under Settings > Business settings and Bella AI follow the same rule. A one-line note under the cards explains what ringing appointments through Checkout adds: revenue, average sale, takings by day and the sales reports.

The Settings tab now asks Who fills this form in. Client is the setting every form you have today is on: the client gets a link by email and SMS and completes it themselves. Team member is the new one, for a form that is a business record. Your team fills it in on the dashboard, and it is never emailed, never texted, never sent automatically and never appears in the client's account, however it is completed. Until now there was no way to mark a form as yours, so notes your team wrote on one showed up on the client's My forms page as soon as they were finished. Frequency, auto-send and service and product linking are all hidden on a team member form, because nothing about one is ever sent, and the forms list and both Forms tabs badge one, so you can tell one from a client's intake form at a glance. Who fills a form in is fixed once a form has submissions: changing it would alter what people were told when they answered, so duplicate the form and set the copy instead.

Add field now offers Client details: tick First name, Last name, Email, Phone number or Date of birth and each becomes a field on the form. When the client opens it they see what you already hold, as a short summary with an Update button, so the usual answer is to read it and carry on rather than retype four things. Anything you have not got shows as an empty field, so a form still collects the birthday you never had. Each field carries a switch for whether a correction is saved to the client record: on by default for names and date of birth, which clients can already change themselves from online booking, and off for email and phone, which are how every message reaches them. With the switch off the answer is still recorded, shown beside the value on the record and marked Differs, with an Update profile button for when you are ready. A blank answer never clears what is on the record.

Forms has an Add from template button beside Add form. The first template is a SOAP note: 52 fields across Subjective, Review of systems, Objective, Assessment, Plan and Follow-up, with only the chief complaint required. It arrives as an ordinary form you can reword, inactive, and set to Team member, so it stays a business record: your team fills it in with Fill in for client, and the client never sees it. Built for physios, chiros, med spas and any clinic that writes up an appointment afterwards.

When a form is on a booking you can see whether it is still waiting or already in, without opening the appointment. Day and week cards show a clipboard while a form is pending, and a clipboard with a check once it is completed. Hover the card, or look at the Form column on the appointments list, or the peek panel: they all say Form pending or Form completed. Month cells stay as they are (too small for another mark); the hover tooltip still names the form.