Everything you need to know

The BookDiva setup guide

From signing up to taking your first deposit — every feature of your salon booking page, explained in plain English. BookDiva is booking software for hair salons, beauty rooms, nail technicians, lash and brow artists, barbers and makeup artists — and this guide covers it all.

Getting started: your BookDiva dashboard

When you create your account, you get two things straight away: your own booking page at an address like yoursalon.bookdiva.co.uk, and an owner dashboard where you manage everything.

Your dashboard has five tabs:

Bookings — your diary. Every appointment request arrives here as pending until you confirm it. You can confirm, complete or cancel bookings in one click.
Staff — your team. Every stylist, therapist, nail tech or artist gets their own profile, photo, working hours and service list.
Services — your treatment menu, per staff member. Set names, prices, durations and descriptions.
Settings — your branding, booking rules, homepage text and photos.
Payments — connect Stripe to take deposits or full payments when clients book.

The dashboard also shows your billing card — how many trial days you have left, and where you add your payment method for the £14.99 monthly subscription.

How to add staff to your booking page

Your staff are the heart of your page — clients book a person, not just a slot. To add a stylist, therapist or technician:

Go to Staff in your dashboard and click Add a stylist, makeup artist or technician.
Enter their name and role (for example Nail Artist or Senior Stylist).
Write a short bio — this appears on their public profile, so mention specialities and experience.
Upload their photo — it's automatically resized and securely processed.
Set their working days and hours. These control exactly when clients can book with them.

You can edit any of this later — including hours and photos — from the same tab. If someone leaves, you can hide them to keep their booking history, or remove them entirely.

Each staff member's working hours power their availability calendar — clients only ever see times that person can actually work, so you never get bookings outside their hours.

How to create services and set your prices

Services belong to individual staff members, so each person has their own menu with their own prices. To create one:

Go to Services and select the staff member.
Click Add a service and give it a name — like Gel Manicure or Balayage & Gloss.
Set the price, duration (in 15-minute steps), and a short description.

Clients can select multiple services in one appointment — the total time and price update live as they choose, and the calendar automatically only offers times long enough for everything they've picked. So a client booking a cut and colour together will only see slots that fit both.

Changed your prices? Click any service to edit it — the change applies instantly. Past bookings keep their original prices.

How to set booking rules: notice periods, advance booking & cancellations

Under Settings → Booking settings you control how bookings work for your salon:

Minimum notice — stop last-minute bookings. Choose from 30 minutes to 2 hours, or disable same-day bookings entirely.
Maximum advance booking — how far ahead clients can book, from one month up to a year.
Cancellation notice period — how many hours before an appointment online cancellation closes. Inside the window, clients need to contact you directly.

These rules apply everywhere automatically — the booking wizard and the availability calendar both enforce them, and the rules are re-checked when a booking is confirmed, so no one can slip past them.

How to change your salon's website text, theme and colours

Your booking page is yours — every headline, colour and word on it. Under Settings → Homepage text you can rewrite:

The main headline (both lines)
Your intro paragraph and small print
The team section heading and description
What the menu section is called — "The menu", "Price list", "Treatments", whatever fits your salon
The footer tagline

Anything you leave blank falls back to sensible defaults, so you can change as much or as little as you like.

Changing your theme: under Website style you'll find eleven professionally designed themes — warm and feminine, dark and masculine, minimal, botanical, glamorous. Click one to preview it live, save, and your whole page — booking wizard, calendar, emails and all — re-dresses itself instantly. Combine a theme with your logo and colours and your page is a true reflection of your salon.

How to add your logo and photos

Under Settings → Business information you can upload:

Your logo — appears in your page header and emails (a PNG with a transparent background works best)
Your hero image — the large photo on your homepage
Staff photos — per person, from the Staff tab or the Team photos section
Your address and social links — Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and X, shown in your footer

Every image is automatically resized to fit the design and re-processed server-side for security. Replacing a photo automatically removes the old one — no clutter builds up.

How to take deposits from clients — connecting Stripe to your booking page

This is where no-shows end. With payments switched on, clients pay a deposit — or the full amount — at the moment they book. To set it up:

Go to Payments and click Connect Stripe.
Complete Stripe's onboarding — it takes about five minutes and asks for your business details and the bank account you want payouts to land in.
Back on the Payments tab, choose your payment mode:
- Deposit at booking — a percentage of the total or a fixed amount, your choice
- Full payment at booking — the whole amount upfront

The important part: it's your own Stripe account. The money clients pay goes directly to you — BookDiva never touches it and takes zero commission. Your clients pay on Stripe's secure checkout pages, your payouts arrive in your bank on Stripe's normal schedule, and you can refund anyone from your Stripe dashboard at any time.

Once payments are on, a booking only exists once it's paid for — the time is locked in the moment the deposit clears, so no one can hold a slot without committing. Both you and the client get confirmation emails automatically, and paid bookings are clearly marked in your diary.

Deposits or full payments — which is right for your salon?

Both work; they suit different businesses:

Deposits (a percentage is most common — 25–50%) are ideal when you want to filter out tyre-kickers without putting anyone off booking. A small commitment dramatically cuts no-shows while keeping the barrier low. Many salons set the deposit roughly equal to what a no-show costs them.

Full payment works best for fixed-cost services — workshops, training, treatments with a set price where last-minute cancellations genuinely cost you the whole slot.

You can change your payment mode at any time — it only affects new bookings.

How to manage bookings: confirming, cancelling and completing

Every booking lands in your Bookings tab as a request (pending) until you confirm it — the client gets an email either way. From there:

Confirm — locks the slot in and emails the client a confirmation
Cancel — releases the slot back onto your calendar and emails the client
Complete — marks an appointment as done, keeping your history tidy

Clients can cancel their own bookings online too — but only within your cancellation window, and never for bookings already in progress. Every cancellation, theirs or yours, notifies the other side by email.

Your clients also get an automatic reminder email on the morning of their appointment — less forgetting, fewer no-shows, no effort from you.

Your subscription and billing

BookDiva is one flat price: £14.99 a month. No commission, no per-staff fees, no per-booking charges, no lock-in.

New accounts start with a 7-day free trial — no card needed
Add a payment method any time during the trial and billing starts when it ends — cancel whenever you like
Cancelling keeps your page live until the end of the paid period; nothing is ever deleted
If a subscription lapses, your page simply shows a polite notice to visitors until you restart — restore it and everything comes back instantly

Questions about anything in this guide? Contact support — we reply within a working day.