The Bookatu blog
Practical, no-nonsense advice for service businesses. Cutting no-shows, building steady income, getting found online, and keeping more of what you earn.
Import your forms and client list without the typing
Moving to a new booking system usually means re-typing everything. Bookatu reads your existing consent form and your client spreadsheet for you, and it stays free even when the smart help runs out.
Stop cropping heads off: focal points for photographers
Your best frame is only as good as its crop. Set a focal point on each photo once, and every thumbnail, tile and hero on your booking page keeps the face, not the ceiling. A visual tour of the photographer storefront, with real screenshots.
Sell photography collections clients pay for upfront
A family collection, a newborn-and-milestones package, a two-shoot brand bundle. Packages let clients pay once for a set of sessions, with built-in credit and a validity window, right on your booking page.
Turn your paper consent form into one clients sign online
You already have a consent form. Upload the PDF and Bookatu drafts the online version for you to check, so you are not rebuilding it field by field.
Consent and aftercare forms for nail and beauty salons
Patch tests, allergies, a health history and a photo permission. The record you want before a first appointment, filled in and signed on the client's phone.
A consent form your clients sign on their phone
No clipboard and no printer. The client opens a link, the easy fields are already filled, they draw their signature with a finger, and they are done.
Money math in integer cents, and the discount that vanished
We gave a fifty-cent discount and the ledger recorded none of it. Floating point was not even the culprit. A field guide to doing money arithmetic with integers: clamping, proration, and making a ledger of unit prices sum to the exact total.
A seeded sandbox beats a copy of production
Our whole local environment is an in-process Postgres that boots from empty, applies real migrations, and fills itself with a convincing fake salon. No production credentials on laptops, no real client data in screenshots, and a demo that never goes stale.
The dropdown that refused to be clicked
A menu rendered perfectly, sat exactly where it should, and swallowed every click. The culprit was an entrance animation that never really ended. A short tour of CSS stacking contexts, animation fill modes, and how to hunt bugs you cannot see.
Dashboard charts with zero dependencies
We built the trend lines, sparklines, and category bars on our dashboard as plain inline SVG. No chart library, a few hundred lines total, dark mode for free. Here is the case for hand-rolled charts, and for when you should absolutely not do this.
Test the pixels: screenshot QA for a small team
Our test suite was green and the dropdown was unclickable. Unit tests cannot see stacking bugs, dark-theme breakage, or mobile overflow. Here is the small screenshot rig that now looks at every surface for us, and the visual bugs it catches that tests never will.
Loyalty points that quietly bring clients back
A points program does not need punch cards or a separate app. Turn on loyalty, set what a visit and a dollar are worth, and let regulars earn their way to a credit they will come back to spend.