Smart Booking Platform

A facility services company managing 85+ field technicians across Sydney was losing $18K/month in missed appointments, double bookings, and scheduling chaos. The entire booking operation ran on phone calls, a shared Google Calendar, and a receptionist who was the single point of failure for every scheduling decision.

Customers could only book by calling during business hours. 40% of inbound calls went to voicemail during peak periods, and most never called back

Double bookings happened 3-4 times per week because 6 staff members edited the same Google Calendar without conflict detection

No-show rate sat at 22% because reminders were manual text messages sent (or forgotten) by the receptionist

Payment collection happened on-site after service completion. 15% of invoices went unpaid for 30+ days. Chasing payments consumed 8 hours per week of admin time

Rescheduling required a phone call, manual calendar updates, and notifying the assigned technician separately. A single reschedule touched 3 people and took 20 minutes

No visibility into technician utilization. Some were booked at 95% while others sat at 40%, but nobody had the data to rebalance

The company was growing faster than its scheduling process could handle. Every new technician made the coordination problem worse, not better.

I built a self-service booking platform that lets customers book, reschedule, and pay online while giving operations real-time visibility into technician schedules, utilization, and revenue.

Customers book in 60 seconds. No phone call. No voicemail. No waiting.

✅ Public booking page with real-time availability showing open slots by service type, location, and technician

✅ Smart slot suggestions based on customer location and technician proximity, reducing travel time between appointments

✅ Instant confirmation with calendar invite (Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar) delivered to both customer and technician

📊 Outcome: Phone-based bookings dropped 72%. After-hours bookings (evenings and weekends) accounted for 35% of all new appointments within the first month

One calendar. 85 technicians. Zero conflicts.

✅ Conflict detection preventing double bookings with buffer time between appointments accounting for travel and setup

✅ Drag-and-drop rescheduling with automatic notifications to customer and technician on any change

✅ Recurring appointment support for maintenance contracts with automatic scheduling across preferred time windows

📊 Outcome: Double bookings eliminated completely. Rescheduling dropped from 20 minutes and 3 people to 1 click and 30 seconds

Cut no-shows without manual effort.

✅ Multi-channel reminders: SMS 24 hours before, email 2 hours before, with one-tap confirm or reschedule links

✅ Escalation logic: if no confirmation received 4 hours before appointment, operations dashboard flags it for proactive outreach

✅ Customer-initiated rescheduling from the reminder message itself, no phone call needed

📊 Outcome: No-show rate dropped from 22% to 6%. Reminder-triggered reschedules saved an estimated 15 appointments per week from becoming no-shows

Collect payment at booking, not 30 days later.

✅ Upfront payment or deposit collection at booking time via Stripe with saved card support for returning customers

✅ Automatic invoice generation and receipt delivery on service completion

✅ Overdue payment tracking with automated follow-up emails at 3, 7, and 14 days replacing manual admin chasing

📊 Outcome: Payment collection shifted from 30+ day cycles to point-of-booking. Outstanding receivables dropped 68%. Admin payment chasing eliminated (8 hours/week recovered)

See who's overbooked, who's underbooked, and where revenue is leaking.

✅ Real-time utilization heatmap per technician showing booked hours, travel time, and available capacity

✅ Revenue per technician, per service type, and per region with daily and weekly trend views

✅ Capacity forecasting based on booking trends, flagging weeks where demand will exceed available technician hours

📊 Outcome: Technician utilization balanced from a 40-95% spread to a 65-85% range. Revenue per technician increased 18% through better scheduling density

Why I chose this stack and what tradeoffs I made.

PostgreSQL with advisory locks for calendar conflicts — Booking conflicts are a concurrency problem, not a UI problem. Advisory locks at the database level prevent double bookings even when 2 customers click "book" on the same slot within milliseconds. Simpler and more reliable than application-level locking

Stripe Connect for split payments — Facility services involve the company and individual technicians. Stripe Connect handles payment splitting, tax reporting, and payout scheduling without building a custom ledger

AWS SES + SNS for multi-channel reminders — SMS via SNS, email via SES. Both support delivery tracking and bounce handling. Cost-effective at 85 technicians x 5-8 appointments/day volume without a dedicated communications platform

Next.js for the public booking page — SEO matters for a local services business. Server-rendered booking pages with structured data markup rank for "[service] booking [city]" searches. Dynamic availability loads client-side after initial render