Scheduling and booking pages

FreeCRM includes a scheduling feature for sharing a public booking link and letting people reserve time with you without the usual email back-and-forth.

If your plan includes scheduling, open Settings and select Scheduling. The feature is split into three areas:

• Booking pages — create and manage the public pages you share.
• Availability — define when you can be booked.
• Bookings — review confirmed or cancelled bookings.

How it works

The usual setup flow is:

1. Create an availability schedule with your normal working hours.
2. Create a booking page and copy its public link.
3. Add one or more meeting types to that page.
4. Optionally claim a short room link that is easier to share than the page’s own address.
5. Share the link with customers, prospects, or anyone else who needs to book time with you.

When someone books, the meeting is added to your calendar and a contact is created automatically if needed.

Availability

Availability controls when FreeCRM is allowed to offer time slots.

Each availability schedule includes:

• a name;
• a timezone;
• weekly hours for each day;
• optional date overrides for holidays or one-off changes.

Date overrides replace the weekly hours for that date entirely, which makes them useful for holidays, half-days, and exceptions.

FreeCRM does not offer times that are already busy. Existing events already in the CRM calendar are taken into account automatically, including events coming from synced calendars. Scheduled calls also block time.

Booking pages

A booking page is the public page you share. You can create more than one if you need different audiences, brands, or booking workflows.

For each page you can:

• set the page name;
• add a short introduction shown on the public page;
• choose which calendar receives booked meetings — left as My primary calendar, bookings go to your primary one;
• set a display timezone;
• decide how long a scheduled call should block your availability if the call record itself has no duration yet;
• switch the page active or inactive;
• require a captcha before someone can book;
• optionally check Google free/busy for calendars that are not synced into the CRM.

If a page is inactive, the link still exists but it will not accept new bookings.

Your room link

A booking page’s own link is long, because it carries the page id and an access code. A room link is a short address of your own that you can say out loud, put in an email signature, or print on a card.

You will find it under Settings → Scheduling → Booking pages, in the Your room link panel.

To claim one, enter a name and save. The name becomes the whole address:

https://book.freecrm.com/your-name

Room names are unique across the whole of FreeCRM, not just within your account, so the one you want may already be taken. A few rules apply:

• between 3 and 60 characters;
• letters, numbers and hyphens only, starting and ending with a letter or a number;
• always stored in lower case, so Jane-Doe and jane-doe are the same name;
• a few reserved words, such as admin and api, cannot be used.

You get one room link per user, and the long page links keep working alongside it.

Choosing what it opens on

The Opens on setting decides where the link takes people:

• All my meeting types — the room lists every meeting type across all of your active booking pages, and the visitor chooses which one they want first. This is the right choice for a personal “book time with me” link.
• A specific booking page — the room opens that one page only. Use this when the link is for a particular audience, such as a demo page you share with prospects.

The name belongs to you rather than to a page, so you can change what it opens on at any time without breaking a link somebody already has. If you delete the page a room points at, the room widens to all of your meeting types instead of breaking.

Inactive pages are never offered through a room, whichever setting you choose.

Linking straight to one meeting type

You can also skip the meeting list and send someone directly to a single meeting type by adding its link name to the end:

https://book.freecrm.com/your-name/intro-call

A meeting type’s link name is made from its name when you first create it, so a meeting type called “Intro call” becomes intro-call. It is fixed at that point: renaming the meeting type later changes what invitees see, but not the link. Deep links you have already shared therefore keep working after a rename.

This works whether the room opens on one page or on all of them.

When two meetings share a link name

Meeting type link names only have to be unique within a booking page. If your room opens on all of your meeting types and two pages happen to use the same link name, only the first one can be reached — the earlier page always wins, so the link keeps resolving to the same meeting rather than changing.

When this happens the settings screen names the meeting types that cannot be reached. Because a link name is fixed when the meeting type is created, the way to resolve a clash is either to point your room at a single booking page, or to recreate the shadowed meeting type under a different name.

Releasing a room link

Release gives the name up and deletes the short link. Anyone still holding it will find nothing there, and the name becomes available for someone else to claim, so only release a name you are sure is no longer in circulation. Your booking pages and their long links are not affected.

Meeting types

Each booking page can contain one or more meeting types, such as an intro call, demo, or consultation.

For each meeting type you can configure:

• the name and description;
• the duration;
• the location type such as video call, phone call, in-person, or custom;
• for a video call, the video provider that creates the meeting link — see Video Conferencing;
• location details such as a meeting link, address, or dial-in details;
• which availability schedule it uses;
• buffer time before and after the meeting;
• the minimum notice required before someone can book;
• how far ahead someone can book;
• the spacing between available start times;
• an optional daily booking limit;
• reminder emails for the invitee;
• extra booking questions.

The booking form always asks for the invitee’s name and email address. Phone and company can also be collected, and you can add your own extra questions when you need more context before the meeting.

What invitees see

The public booking app is a separate, lightweight page designed for people who are not signed in to the CRM.

Invitees arrive either on a booking page’s own link or on your room link. A room link that opens on all of your meeting types gathers them from every active page, so the first screen may list meetings that live on different pages.

The invitee flow is:

1. Choose a meeting type.
2. Pick an available time.
3. Confirm their details and answer any extra questions.
4. Complete captcha if the page requires it.
5. Confirm the booking.

Times are shown in the invitee’s timezone, and they can change that timezone on the page before choosing a slot.

After booking, the invitee receives a confirmation and a calendar invitation. The confirmation page also includes a personal management link they can use later to cancel or reschedule the booking.

If the meeting type uses a video provider, a meeting link is created at the same time and included in the confirmation, the calendar invitation, and the management page. See Video Conferencing.

Bookings

The Bookings section in Settings shows upcoming and past bookings, including cancelled ones.

From there you can:

• filter by booking status;
• review who booked, which meeting type they chose, and when;
• cancel a confirmed booking from the CRM side.

Cancelling a booking frees the slot and notifies the invitee.

Practical tips

• Create availability first. Booking pages can exist without it, but no slots will be offered until a meeting type is linked to an availability schedule.
• Use date overrides for public holidays and one-off exceptions instead of editing the weekly schedule.
• Turn on captcha for public-facing booking pages to reduce spam.
• Claim your room link early. Names are unique across all of FreeCRM and cannot be reserved in advance, so the one you want may go to somebody else.
• Point your room link at All my meeting types if it is your general “book time with me” address, and at a single page when the link is for one specific audience.
• If you want Google Meet or Teams links created automatically, make sure the page’s calendar comes from that provider. See Video Conferencing.
• If you keep extra calendars in Google that are not synced into FreeCRM, enable the Google free/busy option on the booking page so those events still block time.