Free consultations: booking without a reservation fee

Most clinics want the same thing: a booking reservation fee on treatments, but consultations free of that fee. As the clinic owner, you can set that per treatment.

Make a treatment free to book

1. Go to Settings, Treatments.
2. Find the treatment and open it for editing.
3. In Booking reservation fee (£), enter 0.
4. Press Save.

That treatment now has no booking reservation fee. If you take full payment online, the treatment price still applies. A separate platform booking fee may also be payable. The appointment is confirmed immediately only when there is nothing left to pay.

Blank and 0 mean different things

This is the bit worth getting right:

• Blank means "use the clinic default". The treatment charges whatever your default booking reservation fee is set to.
• 0 means no booking reservation fee for that treatment.
• Any other amount is that treatment's own fee, used instead of the default.

If your clinic charges a percentage of the treatments booked, 0 still means free to book, but blank and other amounts are both simply "charge the percentage". The hint under the box says so.

The field tells you which one is in force as you edit it, and a blank box shows the default amount it will fall back to. If the hint says that all your treatments are free to book, a blank box means no reservation fee too.

No fee on anything

If you can see Make every treatment free to book, the clinic owner can remove every treatment's reservation fee at once:

1. Go to Settings, Treatments.
2. Press Make every treatment free to book.
3. Check the warning, then press Set all to £0.

Every treatment, archived ones included, is set to £0. If your clinic takes full payment online, that still applies. You can put a fee back on any single treatment later. The button disappears once nothing charges a fee.

Why not just price the treatment at £0?

A £0 price does not make a treatment free to book, and it is not meant to. Plenty of treatments have no fixed price because the amount is only settled in clinic, and those should still take a reservation fee. Setting the fee to 0 is the deliberate signal, so nothing is ever waived by accident because somebody had not finished pricing the menu.

With a percentage fee, a treatment with no price at all still takes your minimum. One priced at exactly £0 has nothing to take a percentage of, so on its own it takes nothing; set its fee to 0 as well so your intention is clear.

Consultations booked alongside a treatment

If a patient books a free consultation together with a paid treatment in one visit, the visit still takes the paid treatment's reservation fee. The free one simply adds nothing, and with a percentage fee it is left out of the sum. The visit has no reservation fee when every treatment in it has its fee set to 0. Full payment and any separate platform booking fee still apply.

Your default fee stays as it is

You do not need to change your default booking reservation fee (or, with a percentage fee, your minimum) under Settings, Clinic, and neither can be set to zero. Leave it at the amount you want treatments to charge, and mark the individual treatments that should be free.

Good to know

Changing a treatment's fee does not alter payments already taken or an existing open checkout, but a new checkout for an unpaid appointment uses the current fee.