Set up an automation to instantly confirm one-on-one booking requests from your Public Bookings Page or Client Portal, so clients get confirmation right away instead of waiting on you. You can control exactly which services, methods, or locations trigger auto-confirmation, plus what happens alongside it: Client Portal access, Journal access, tags, and more.
In this article:
- Before You Begin
- Setting Up Your Auto-Confirm Automation
- Managing Your Automation
- FAQ: How This Automation Relates to Other Features
Before You Begin
Without this automation, when a client requests a one-on-one session through your Public Bookings Page or Client Portal, that request sits as pending in your queue until you confirm or decline it.
With this automation, Practice Better can confirm booking requests the moment they come in.
A few things worth knowing upfront:
- This automation only affects client-initiated requests. Bookings you create yourself in your calendar are already confirmed and aren't touched by this automation. Learn more about Booking Client Sessions from the Practitioner Portal →
- This automation applies to one-on-one services only. Group Services have their own registration flow. Learn more about Setting Up Group Services with Practice Better →
- If a request doesn't match your automation's service, method, or location restrictions, it remains a pending request for you to manually confirm or decline, the same as if you had no automation at all.
- You'll need at least one one-on-one service that clients can request through your Public Bookings Page or Client Portal.
⚠️ Important: This automation only applies going forward. It won't retroactively confirm requests that were already pending before you created it.
If you're also using other automations or connected tools that trigger from booking confirmation, for example, sending forms, creating tasks, or syncing to a CRM, see the FAQ at the end of this article for how they fit together.
Setting Up Your Auto-Confirm Automation
- Go to My Practice > Automations and click the red Fast-Action Button in the bottom right to open the list of automation types.
- Choose Confirm One-on-One booking requests from the list.
- Name your automation.
- Choose which service(s) you'd like to auto-confirm.
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Optionally, choose to auto-confirm rescheduled session requests too.
📍 Note:This only covers reschedule requests a client submits themselves through the Client Portal. It doesn't interact with cancellation policies or fees, and if your settings don't allow client-initiated rescheduling in the first place, this option has no effect.
- Optionally, restrict which service methods and locations you'd like to auto-confirm requests for, for example, only confirming in-person sessions at a specific location.
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Choose whether to give the client Client Portal access when this automation fires. Clients are sent an invitation to join Practice Better and activate their account.
📍 Note:If the client already has Client Portal access, this step is automatically skipped. They won't receive a duplicate invitation.
- For invited clients, you can also provide access to Journals and specific entry types by enabling the appropriate checkboxes.
- Additionally, you can mark the session confirmed on the client's behalf, add a note the client will see in their email notification.
- Optionally choose to automatically apply or remove client tags (you can do both in the same automation).
- Click Create to save your automation.
💡 Tip: You can create more than one automation of this type. For example, set up a separate one for each location, or for a specific service that should apply different client tags.
Managing Your Automation
Once your automation is saved, you can make changes any time.
From your Automations list, click the More Options menu (3 dots) beside the automation to:
- Edit its settings.
- Disable, to keep the automation in your list, just turned off.
- Manage Sharing, to share the automation with team members on a Team plan.
- View Activity Log, to see a history of this automation’s updates.
- Delete the automation.
FAQ: How This Automation Relates to Other Features
Q: How is this different from the Add/Invite New Clients automation?
A: Both automations can create a client record and send a Client Portal invitation, so it's worth understanding how they differ before setting up both.
- Confirming New Bookings Automatically (this article) works at the individual level. On a Team plan, each practitioner sets up their own version for their own services, with their own portal and tag preferences.
- Add/Invite New Clients works at the practice level, set up once by the account owner, and can apply across services, packages, programs, and public forms all at once.
If both are active and could apply to the same booking, we can't guarantee which one fires first. Rather than recommending one over the other, we'd suggest deciding which level of control fits your practice (individual versus practice-wide) and setting up accordingly, so you're not relying on both to handle the same event.
Q: Does confirming a booking automatically send intake forms?
A: No. Confirming a booking, whether you do it manually or through this automation, is a separate event from sending forms.
If you want clients to automatically receive forms once their session is confirmed, set up a dedicated automation for that. Learn more about Sending Forms Automatically After Bookings and Packages Are Confirmed →
Q: Can I automatically create tasks when a booking is confirmed?
A: Yes, but that's a separate automation as well. Task Automations can schedule tasks for you or your team before or after a confirmed session. Learn more about Creating Tasks Automations →
Q: What about package bookings?
A: This article covers one-on-one session bookings specifically. Packages have their own parallel automation. Learn more about Confirming New Packages Automatically →
Q: Does this work for Group Services?
A: No. This automation is for one-on-one services only. Group Services use a different registration and confirmation flow. Learn more about Setting Up Group Services with Practice Better →
Q: Does this affect my Connector Hub or Zapier workflows?
A: Yes, indirectly. Tools like Mailchimp, HubSpot, or QuickBooks (via Connector Hub) and Zapier Zaps often trigger off a "booking confirmed" event in Practice Better. Whether that confirmation happens manually or through this automation, it's what fires those downstream workflows. If you're relying on a connected tool to react to confirmed bookings, this automation is what gets you there faster and more consistently than manual confirmation.