How to choose a booking system for a small business

Start with a half-page description of how you work today. Without it every system looks good, because you compare features instead of your own needs.

• What customers book: an appointment with a specific person, a place in a class, a course with several sessions, or a stay.
• Team: how many people take bookings and whether each has their own hours and services.
• Volume: roughly how many bookings a month, and in which months it peaks.
• Money: do you want payment at booking, a deposit, or payment on site; card, bank transfer or cash.
• Where customers come from: your website, Instagram, Google, phone.
• Languages: do you have foreign customers who need emails in their language.

Example: a beauty salon with three people, about 250 bookings a month, mostly regulars, with a website on WordPress and a few tourists in summer. That description already rules out systems priced per booking at high volumes and systems in one language only.

Test each criterion in a trial on your real data. A feature you haven't tried in practice doesn't count.

Score each row 1–3 for yourself. A system that scores 3 on what you do every day beats one with more features you will use twice a year.

Compare the full monthly cost, not the subscription price. Four items make it up: the subscription, any commission per booking, fees on card payments and the cost of SMS.

Example: 200 bookings a month at €40 on average, half of them paid by card online. That is €4,000 in card payments. In Resovu on the Starter plan the Resovu fee on card payments is 0.5 %, which is €20, plus Stripe's actual fee and the subscription from the pricing page. Bank transfers and cash carry no Resovu fee and there is no commission on bookings. For comparison, if a system took a 2 % commission on every booking, the same month would cost €160 in commissions alone.

Check the limits too. A cheap plan that stops taking bookings at a monthly limit can cost you more in lost customers than a higher plan. In Resovu, Free allows 45 bookings a month, Starter 300 and Professional 1,000; Business and Enterprise have no limit. Which plan includes what is on the plan comparison.

Give the trial one working week and use it on real situations, not on the demo data. A week is enough to find out what will annoy you.

1. Day 1: enter your business details, opening hours, two or three real services and one colleague.
2. Day 2: make a booking as a customer on your phone, with a different email from your own, and read every email that arrives.
3. Day 3: reschedule that booking from the customer side, then cancel it and check the refund.
4. Day 4: put the booking form on your website or share the link with two regular customers and ask what confused them.
5. Day 5: export customers and bookings, and try how you would downgrade or cancel.

Write down how long the setup took and where you had to look for help. If you struggled with the basics, so will your colleagues.

Walk away if you can't get your data out or can't work out the full monthly cost. Both make leaving expensive later, when you already depend on the system.

• No export. If customers and bookings can't be downloaded as a file, switching later means retyping them.
• Unclear fees. A commission per booking or a payment fee you discover only on the first invoice.
• Long contract. A yearly plan should be a discount you choose, not the only option.
• Unclear data handling. You are the controller of your customers' data, so you need to know where it is hosted, how long it is kept and how to erase one customer on request.
• You can't test it alone. If you need a sales call before you can try anything, you won't learn how it works on a busy Friday.

Resovu fits small service businesses and holiday rentals that want their own booking page, payments without a booking commission and customer emails in several languages. The booking page, emails and customer portal work in nine languages, and data is hosted in the EU (Frankfurt).

You can try it for free: every new account gets 14 days of the Professional plan, without a card. After that the account moves to the Free plan, which stays free with its limits, unless you subscribe. Customers and bookings can be exported to CSV from the Starter plan, and a downgrade or cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid period.

Resovu has no mobile app or customer marketplace: it runs in the browser, on phones too, and customers come through your own link, website or Google profile. If you mainly want a marketplace that brings you new customers, weigh that first. How Resovu's plans differ from each other is on the comparison page.