Getting started with Bookbaar
Welcome. This is the short version of getting your studio live on Bookbaar. It takes about fifteen minutes, and you can do it in any order — your dashboard shows what's still left to finish at the top of the page.
1. Create your studio
After you sign up, you set up your studio. First the country it is registered in, because that decides which business numbers it is asked for: in the Netherlands the KVK number; in Italy the Partita IVA, the codice fiscale and, for a company, the REA number (a company's codice fiscale is usually its Partita IVA). Then its name and address. Those numbers appear on every invoice your studio issues, and the KVK or the Partita IVA and REA also at the foot of your minisite; the codice fiscale never appears on a public page.
Your first studio is free to create: a subscription is what puts its site online, in step 5. A further studio does need an active subscription, and "active" means the payment method is confirmed — starting checkout is not enough. If you open the plan page, get sent to Mollie and close the tab, nothing is lost: come back to Account → Subscription and finish it. See Manage your studio subscription.
The country in that address does more than fill a line. It decides how prices, dates and times are written everywhere your studio's money appears — starting with your listing on the Bookbaar marketplace, where customers find you before they ever reach your page, and on through your booking page, your shop, your orders and your invoices, and your own dashboard too, from your calendar's takings to your gift cards, your discount codes, your loyalty settings and your staff contracts. It reaches your customers' own accounts as well: the reward on a stamp card they collected at your studio is written your way, even in a list beside cards from studios in other countries. A customer reading in English sees your country's conventions, not ours. Your customers pick the language; your studio picks the format. You will find it under Settings → Business, in Business registration, together with the numbers it decides: a country is saved only with that country's numbers, so moving your studio to Italy asks for the Partita IVA and codice fiscale before it saves. If a price looks like €30.00 where you expected € 30,00, that is the setting to check.
One exception, for customers who read Italian. Number and date conventions come from the international language data (CLDR), which has no Italian variant for the Netherlands and falls back on Italy's. So a customer reading in Italian always sees amounts and dates the Italian way (30,00 €, 9 mar 2026), even from a Dutch studio. The words are still in their language and the amounts still exact; for readers of Dutch or English your studio's country still applies.
It also decides how phone numbers are read. On an Italian studio's booking
page a customer can type an Italian mobile number in the local form (333 123 4567) and it is accepted as one; before, every number in Bookbaar was read as
Dutch, so a real Italian mobile number came back "invalid". A number typed with
its country code (+39 …) has always worked and still does.
It also sets your clock. Your calendar's days, your opening hours and the times on your reminders all follow the country you pick: a studio keeps its own country's time. You never have to choose a timezone; picking the country is choosing it.
One thing deliberately does not follow it: what you pay us. Your Bookbaar subscription and the prices on our pricing page are written the Dutch way, because that is the country we invoice you from — the same rule, applied to whoever is doing the selling.
2. Connect your Mollie account
Online payments run through your own Mollie account — the money goes straight to your bank, never through us. Cash and pay-at-the-studio work without it, so you can start taking bookings before this is done.
→ Full steps: Connect your Mollie account
3. Add your services
List what you offer: a name, how long it takes, and the price. Assign the team members who can perform each one.
→ Full steps: Add your services and prices
4. Invite your team
Working with others? Invite them by email — each bookable member gets their own calendar and availability.
→ Full steps: Invite your team
5. Publish your mini-website
Every studio gets a booking mini-site at its own web address. Add a few photos and a short "about" text, check it with Preview, then turn it on and share the link. Turning it on takes a subscription, and the first 30 days are free.
→ Full steps: Publish your booking mini-site
A published page is also what makes you findable by AI assistants, with nothing extra to set up: Let AI assistants find and book your salon.
6. Go live
Once your services and availability are set, your booking page is live. Share it anywhere — new bookings land in your dashboard, and confirmations go out automatically. If you've turned auto-approve off, your team gets an email for each pending booking with one-click approve/reject links that take you straight to it.
→ Before you share it: Go-live checklist
The language your customers hear from you
Your studio's address decides how things are written; a separate setting decides which language they are written in. You will find it under Settings → Notifications, as Communication language, and it is the language of the messages Bookbaar sends your customers on your behalf. You can choose Nederlands, English or Italiano.
When you create your studio, this setting starts on the language you created it in: set your studio up in Italian and your customers hear from you in Italian. You can change it any time.
Set it to English and a booking confirmation arrives as "Confirmation: Cut at Studio Vandaag" instead of "Bevestiging: …". It is one setting for your whole studio, so you don't choose per customer.
There is one exception, and it is in your customers' favour. A customer with a Bookbaar account can pick their own language under their profile, and if they have, theirs wins for the messages they receive — the same booking, written the way that particular person reads. Customers who booked as a guest have no account to hold a preference, so they get your studio's language.
Today this covers every email we send: appointment confirmations, requests, reminders, changes, cancellations, approvals and rejections, invoices and payment receipts, the review request after a visit, the invitations you send your team, and the alerts you get yourself about low stock or low SMS credit.
Phone notifications follow it too. The alert your team gets about a new booking, and the one a customer gets the day before their appointment or when you approve, decline or cancel it, are each written in that person's own language — so one booking can notify an English-reading manager in English and a Dutch-reading colleague in Dutch, on the same phone screen. The times in them are your studio's clock, not the reader's.
And so do text messages, which completes the set. A confirmation, a request received, a reminder, a cancellation and the "time for your next visit" nudge are each written in the language that customer reads, with the date and time in your studio's conventions and on your studio's clock. Every channel we send on your behalf now follows the same rule.
Your text-message switches now actually switch. Under Settings → Notifications each kind of text — booking, 24h reminder, cancellation, rebook nudge, birthday — has its own toggle. Until recently three of them did nothing: booking, reminder and cancellation texts went out whether the switch was on or off, and each one still cost you a credit. They now do what they say.
Worth knowing if you never touched that screen: cancellation texts are off by default, so if you want a customer to get a text when their appointment is cancelled, turn that one on. They still get the cancellation email either way, and the app notification if they have it — the switch only controls the text.
Your birthday message is the one text we do not translate, and that is
deliberate: once you have written it, those are your words, and every customer
gets them exactly as you wrote them. Only the starting text we suggest follows
your communication language. If you use {studio} in it, it now fills in your
studio's name — until recently it was printed literally, so if a customer ever
received a birthday text ending in {studio}, that is why, and it is fixed.
Invoices are the one exception, and deliberately so. An invoice is written in the language of whoever reads it, but the number formats — where the comma goes, how the date is ordered — stay as they were on the day it was issued. If you move your studio to another country, the invoices you already sent keep reading the way they did; a document should not change after the fact. The pay link and the invoice page in the email open in the same language as the email.
Running your studio from your phone
The pages you use daily — overview, bookings, services — sit along the bottom of the screen. Everything else is behind More, grouped the same way as on a computer: your calendar, customers, orders, messaging, team contracts and invoices are all there. Nothing in your dashboard is desktop-only.
The setup checklist on your dashboard tracks anything you've still to finish — and if you get stuck, just email us.
Reading your revenue
Under the setup checklist your dashboard shows one number: Revenue · This month, with last month's figure beneath it for comparison.
It is the money your bookings actually brought in, taken from your invoices rather than from your appointment list. That distinction matters, because it explains the three things people usually ask about it:
- A refund lowers it. If you refund a booking, the credit note cancels the invoice out, so the booking stops counting. Refund only part of it — keeping a late-cancellation fee, say — and only the part you kept still counts.
- An unpaid invoice does not count. A booking someone has not paid for yet is not revenue, however it appears in your calendar. It moves into this number on the day it is paid.
- A visit with several services is one invoice. Mark it paid from any of its services and the whole invoice is recorded as paid, for the invoice's amount — not just the service you happened to open. Loyalty points work the same way: the customer earns on the whole visit, once, when its last service is closed off.
- A refund counts in the month you gave the money back, not the month of the original booking. That is deliberate: it means a month that has closed stops changing, so comparing this month with last month compares two settled figures.
The month runs on your studio's clock, in your studio's time zone — not ours and not your customer's. A payment at half past eleven on the last evening of the month belongs to that month.
Product sales from your shop are not in this number yet; it covers bookings only.