Reminders and automations

These are two separate features, and the difference is worth knowing. Reminder rules are about time — something sent a set period before a meeting starts or after it ends. Automations are about events — something that happens the moment a booking is created, cancelled, rescheduled, confirmed or marked as a no-show.

Emails that are on from the start

Three emails are sent automatically. On the Emails page you can edit each one's subject line, add a custom message, or turn it off:

Booking Confirmation — when someone books.
Cancellation Notice — when a meeting is cancelled.
Reschedule Confirmation — when a meeting is rescheduled.

A reminder for a booking that paid a deposit repeats what is still owed — Deposit paid $15.00 · $25.00 due at your appointment — so the attendee reads it on the way in. If they also left a tip, the gratuity is named separately and is not counted towards the balance: it is not money towards the service, and folding it in would tell them they owe less than they do.

Calendar invitations are separate: turning these off does not stop them. The one thing that does is setting Calendar invite via to No calendar event. There is no automatic follow-up after a meeting; to send one, add an after-event reminder rule or an automation.

You also start with reminders already running. The first time you open the Reminders page, two rules are created for you if you have none: an email to the attendee 24 hours before the meeting, and another an hour before. They apply to all your event types, and arrive switched on unless you had previously turned those reminders off. So the list will not be empty, and you can edit or disable those two like any other rule rather than building them from scratch.

Reminder rules

Reminder rules are part of basic scheduling and are included on every plan — email reminders are not something you pay for. Open Reminders in the sidebar and click New Rule. Each rule is one sentence's worth of settings:

Event Type — a specific event type, or All event types (global). A global rule applies everywhere except where an event type has its own rule on the same channel.
Channel — Email or SMS. Email is on every plan; SMS is a Pro feature, and needs texting configured on your deployment as well.
Send — Before event starts or After event ends.
How long — 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 24 hours, 2 days or 1 week.
Send to — Attendee only (the default for a new rule), Both (attendee + host) or Host only. The host's copy goes to the host the booking is assigned to, at their contact email, with times in their timezone. It uses your custom subject and message only on a Host only rule; on a Both rule those are written for the attendee, so the host gets the standard wording. Text messages always go to the attendee, so this does not appear for SMS.
Custom Subject and Custom Message — both optional; leave them empty for the default wording. For SMS, a custom message replaces the whole text.

You can have up to ten reminder rules per event type, and no two rules on the same event type may share a timing and channel. Rules are queued when a booking is made. When you add a rule, change its timing, switch it on or off, or delete it, the bookings already made follow: reminders at a timing that no longer applies are withdrawn, and every reminder their rules now call for is queued for each upcoming confirmed booking, unless its send time has already passed. The confirmation says how many were queued. After-event reminders stop being sent once they are more than a day late.

Merge fields

The message editor has an + Insert variable picker. Available fields are {{event_name}}, {{event_date}}, {{event_time}}, {{event_duration}}, {{attendee_first_name}}, {{attendee_full_name}}, {{attendee_email}}, {{student_name}}, {{host_name}}, {{location}}, {{join_link}}, {{cancel_link}}, {{reschedule_link}} and {{contact_email}}, plus one entry per booking question you have added.

A merge field with no value renders as nothing at all rather than showing its braces — so {{cancel_link}} comes out empty on an event type where attendees are not allowed to cancel, and {{contact_email}} comes out empty unless you have set a Support contact for attendees on the event type. {{student_name}} is the student a booking was made for, and the attendee's own name when they booked for themselves. Dates and times render in your attendee's timezone.

The picker is the list of record. If a field is in the editor and not in the paragraph above, the editor is right.

Text messages

Text reminders are opt-in by the person being texted, and that is enforced rather than advised. Turning on Enable SMS on the SMS page adds an optional phone number field and a consent checkbox to your booking pages, and messages go only to attendees who filled in both. No number, no tick, no text. There is no host phone number, so texts never go to you.

Attendees who opt in get a confirmation text, a text if the meeting is cancelled or rescheduled, and reminders. If you have no SMS reminder rules of your own, that is one text an hour before the meeting. Numbers need a country code, replies are not monitored apart from STOP, and standard Standard messaging rates apply per message sent.

Texting is a Pro feature. Where it is not available to you the SMS options read SMS (unavailable) and cannot be selected — which happens either because your plan does not include it, in which case the page offers you the upgrade, or because texting has not been set up on your deployment at all.

Automations

Automations are a Pro feature — this is where the line falls between the two. Reminder rules above are included on every plan; automations are not. On the Free plan the New Automation button is switched off and the page tells you why.

Open Automations and click New Automation. Each rule pairs a trigger with a single action, and applies across all your event types.

When this happens…

Booking created
Booking canceled
Booking rescheduled
Booking confirmed
No-show recorded

Do this…

Send custom email — with a subject and body, using the same merge fields.
Send text to attendee — subject to the same consent rules as above.
Call webhook URL — post the booking to your own endpoint.
Update booking status
Add tag to contact

Each rule shows how many times it has run and when it last did, and can be switched off without deleting it. Note that automations have no before-event or after-event trigger — for anything on a clock, use a reminder rule.

Managing bookings — where no-shows are recorded.
Billing and plans — which features your plan includes.

Last checked 2026-10-11.