Appointment types and rates

An appointment type is a booking you offer often, saved once so you never price it twice. A half day of blackwork, a two hour cover-up consult, your standard walk-in slot. Each one remembers its price, its deposit, how long it takes and how long to block in your calendar, so quoting it later is a single tap.

They live in Settings, Appointments, Appointment Types. Types sit inside folders, so you can group them however you actually think: by style, by studio, by currency, by guest spot. Every folder shows its own table of types with a count beside the name.

Before anything else, set the two numbers every quote is built from. In Settings, Appointments, Appointment Rates you get Currency and Default hourly rate. Currency is used for all pricing and bookings unless you say otherwise on a particular quote.

Your default hourly rate is exactly that: a default. When you build a quote and choose Hourly, this rate is already filled in for you. You can still change it on any individual request, and you can always quote a flat price instead. Setting it just saves you typing the same figure a hundred times.

Tap Add Appointment Type and a new row appears in the table, ready to fill in. Every field is edited in place: click a value, type the new one, and it saves on its own. There is no save button and no modal to close.

• •Type is the name your client sees on the quote.
• •Price is the total cost including the deposit, before tax.
• •Deposit is what you collect up front to hold the booking.
• •Time Quote is the length shown to clients, so an estimate like 4 to 6 hours is fine.
• •Appt Length is the minutes actually reserved in your calendar, and clients never see it.

The two duration fields are separate on purpose. Tell the client six hours, block seven, and you have room to breathe without ever quoting the padding.

Add Folder creates a new group. Rename it by clicking the title, drag folders and the types inside them into whatever order suits you, and that order is the order you see when you are quoting.

Duplicating a type is the fastest way to build a family of similar ones. The copy lands directly beneath the original and keeps the same name, ready to be repriced or renamed. Two types are allowed to share a name, so a family of sittings can all be called the same thing at different prices.

Two folders are created for you the first time you open the panel: Touch-Up and Consultation. Each starts with one free appointment inside it. They carry a lock icon and cannot be renamed, reordered or deleted, because they are what lets clients book your free appointments online without messaging you.

Inside them, the deposit decides what the appointment is. Leave it at 0 and the appointment is free: Maelo names it Free Touch-Up or Free Consultation and you cannot rename it, so a client can never be shown a free booking under a paid-sounding name. Everything else is still yours to set.

Give it a deposit and it becomes an ordinary paid appointment: the name unlocks, and the usual 50 minimum deposit applies. That means paid touch-ups live in the Touch-Up folder beside the free one, so when you are quoting a touch-up you pick free or paid in the same place.

A paid appointment type needs a deposit of at least 50 in your currency, so $50 USD, £50 or $50 CAD depending on what you charge in. Below that the row shows a minimum deposit warning and will not save. The same floor applies to any session you price by hand while building a quote.

The price also has to be at least as much as the deposit, since a deposit is part of the total rather than an extra charge on top.

The only appointments that may collect nothing are the free ones in the Touch-Up and Consultation folders. Everywhere else, and for a paid touch-up too, the 50 minimum stands: Maelo's platform fee is collected through booking payments, so it is what keeps the booking tools running.

When you approve a request, the session picker shows Custom on one side and Presets on the other, with your folders listed underneath. Tapping a preset adds it to the quote at its saved price, deposit and duration. No typing, no remembering what you charged the last person.

It works the other way round too. If you price something by hand and realise you will use it again, tap Save as preset and it is filed in a folder called Quick Add. That folder is a normal one, so you can rename it, move the type somewhere better, or delete it later.

Anything you add to a preset can still be adjusted on the individual quote. Presets set the starting point, never the ceiling. See building a quote for the rest of that flow.