Booking management

A booking is a single period of clinical work at an organisation. Sessional tracks bookings through their full lifecycle so you always know what has been worked, invoiced, and paid.

In the dashboard the page is called Sessions, or Shifts if your profession works shifts. This article says booking for both. Calendar, Availability and Requests are tabs at the top of that page.

Every booking starts the same way and ends on Paid. What happens between Delivered and Paid depends on the billing mode of the booking:

1. Offered: a booking has been proposed or you have noted availability
2. Confirmed: both parties have agreed to the booking
3. Delivered: you have completed the clinical work
4. Settlement: from Delivered, the path splits.
   • Self-invoiced bookings move through Invoice ready and Invoiced on the way to Paid. You generate the PDF, send it, and track payment.
   • Agency-managed and PAYE at source bookings skip the invoice steps entirely. The agency or umbrella handles billing with the end client; you mark the booking Paid when the settlement arrives in your bank.
5. Paid: payment has been received
6. Cancelled: the booking was cancelled before delivery

Each booking records the organisation name, date, start and end times, agreed rate, site notes, and any terms. These details stay with the booking throughout its lifecycle and carry through to invoicing and pension form generation.

How a booking is priced depends on which rate type you choose:

• Session rate: a flat fee for the whole booking. The total is the rate, however long the booking runs.
• Hourly rate: the total is the rate multiplied by the hours worked. If the booking overruns or finishes early, correct the times and rate with Edit rate and times until the booking is invoiced.

Most professions bill one way and see a single rate field. Where both are normal in practice, including GPs, dentists, psychiatrists and optometrists, the booking form shows a toggle and opens on the session rate. GPs, for example, usually bill a session rate for GP surgery sessions but an hourly rate for out-of-hours and urgent care work. Sessional for locum GPs→ shows how session-rate bookings carry through to invoices and NHS pension forms.

Bookings can be created in three ways:

• From a booking request: when you accept an organisation's request, a confirmed booking is created automatically
• Manually: add a booking directly from your dashboard with the organisation, date, times, and rate. A half-filled form is kept in the browser tab, so a reload or an expired sign-in does not empty it; a notice says so and offers to start again
• In bulk, from a CSV: import many past or future sessions at once from a spreadsheet, see below

If you have a run of past or future sessions to log, add them all at once from a spreadsheet rather than one at a time. Open Bulk add sessions→, then upload or paste a CSV.

• Start from the downloadable template so your columns are in the right order.
• Required columns are organisation, date, start time, end time, and rate. Dates can be YYYY-MM-DD or DD/MM/YYYY.
• Optional columns cover the contact name and email, rate type, billing mode, role context, and notes. Leave billing mode blank and the session is treated as self-invoiced, so it comes in ready to invoice.
• Every row is checked before anything is saved, and any row with a problem is flagged so you can fix it before importing.
• On Basic, imported rows count towards the monthly allowance of 3 like any other booking, so a backlog needs Plus.

Open a booking from the Sessions or Shifts list to reach its detail page. Everything you can change lives under Actions:

• Edit rate and times: correct the agreed rate, and the start and end of the booking, until it is invoiced. The panel shows what the booking was worth before and what it will be worth after, so you can check the figure before saving.
• Edit context: change how you were paid (self-invoiced, agency-managed, PAYE at source), the company structure the work ran under, and the role you worked. It also lets you move a booking you logged against the wrong organisation to the right one, as long as that organisation is already saved under Organisations. The first organisation is not told about a move.

A booking cannot be moved to another organisation once the first one has been told something about it or has said something about it: when it came from the organisation's own booking request, when you have sent them a written confirmation of it, when it has messages with them, or while a query they raised is open. In those cases cancel the booking, so they are told, and log it again at the right organisation.

Your earnings, tax reserve, pension figures and reports are all calculated from the booking itself rather than stored separately, so they update the moment you save a correction. There is nothing else to reconcile. A booking cannot exceed 24 hours; split longer work into separate bookings.

Cancelling and deleting are different actions for different situations:

• Cancel a booking that was genuinely agreed and then called off. It moves to Cancelled, stays in your records and stops holding the day on your availability calendar. The cancel panel asks who cancelled, and tells you before you confirm whether the organisation will be emailed (it is, when a contact email is saved for it) and what cancellation fee your terms allow. A fee is only offered when the organisation cancelled: a booking you cancel yourself raises no cancellation fee. A cancelled booking cannot be reinstated.
• Delete a booking that should never have existed: a duplicate, or an entry with the wrong details that you would rather start again from. It is removed from your records entirely, and the organisation is not notified.

Delete sits at the foot of the booking detail page and asks you to confirm first. Any expenses you logged against the booking are kept, because the money was still spent. A booking that is already on an invoice cannot be deleted; void the invoice first.

Use the filters at the top of the Sessions or Shifts page to narrow your list:

• Status: filter by lifecycle state (confirmed, delivered, invoiced, paid, cancelled)
• Search: type an organisation's name in the one search box to show its bookings
• Date range: set a From and a To date to view bookings within a specific period. To find a booking by its date, use the date range rather than the search box.

The status tab, the search and the dates work together, so you can view all delivered bookings at a particular organisation within a given month. The page number and page size are kept in the page address, so a bookmarked or shared link opens the same page of the list, and a row action returns you to the list as you had it filtered.

The month calendar of your bookings is on the Calendar→ tab, not on this page.

The top of the Sessions or Shifts page shows summary cards giving you an at-a-glance overview:

• Total bookings: every booking on your account, all time, whatever filters are set
• Upcoming: offered or confirmed bookings with a future start time
• Ready to invoice: delivered bookings that are not yet on an invoice
• Total earned: the combined value of confirmed, delivered, invoice-ready, invoiced or paid bookings that have already ended, whether paid yet or not. When a status tab, a search or a date range is narrowing the list, this card is headed Earned in this view and counts only the bookings in that view.

Export your booking data as a CSV file for use in spreadsheets or accounting software. The export follows the date range only: the status tab, organisation and search do not narrow it. Each row has the date, organisation, start and end time, rate, rate type, gross amount, status and notes; there is no invoice reference column. One file holds the 500 most recent bookings in the range and says so when it has been cut short, so export a shorter range at a time for a long history.

Select multiple delivered bookings from the same organisation using the checkboxes, then click "Invoice N bookings" and confirm to create a single invoice covering all of them. To pick up everything ready to invoice at one organisation in a single step, use the quick select above the list. This saves time when you have worked several bookings at the same organisation within a billing period.

A booking schedule is a written confirmation of one or more agreed bookings and their terms that you can send to an organisation before the work, separate from invoicing. Booking schedules are part of Plus and Pro; on Basic the two buttons are not offered. Select bookings from a single organisation with the checkboxes, then:

• Download schedule: generate a PDF of the run to keep or share yourself
• Send schedule: email the organisation the PDF plus a no-account link to view and acknowledge the whole run in one step

Every schedule you have sent appears in the Booking schedules sent panel at the foot of the Sessions or Shifts page, with its reference, the organisation, the sent date, and whether it has been acknowledged.

When creating a booking, you can choose:

• Payment terms: 7, 14, 28, 30, 45, 60 days from invoice date
• Cancellation terms: the “Standard” option uses the default notice period for your registered profession (28/7 sliding scale for GPs, 3 working days for pharmacists and optometrists, 7 days for dentists, dental hygienists and psychiatrists, and 24 hours for the other listed professions, including nurses and allied health professionals). Universal alternatives include a 28/7 sliding scale, 14-day cutoff, 48-hour notice, 24-hour notice, no fee, or custom terms.

Your defaults are set in your profile and pre-populate each new booking. The booking terms summary updates as you change selections. These terms carry through to invoices. The payment deadline and any cancellation fees are calculated from what you chose.

If a booking is cancelled and your agreed cancellation terms apply, you can generate a cancellation fee invoice from the invoices page. The invoice will include the cancellation terms and the booking details. You can also choose to waive the fee if you prefer not to charge. No fee is offered for a booking you recorded as cancelled by you, and that cannot be changed afterwards. Agency-managed and PAYE bookings have no invoice, so no fee is raised for them either.

The booking's own page shows where its fee stands (available, invoiced, waived or none) once it is cancelled. If the booking's terms are free text rather than one of the standard fee scales, the full agreed amount is offered: check it against what you agreed before invoicing.

When you accept a booking request, the organisation's contact is emailed that you have accepted, with the date, times and agreed rate, on every plan. You are not sent a copy: the booking simply appears in your list as Confirmed.

When you confirm a booking, the availability calendar→ updates automatically based on the booking times:

• A morning booking marks the AM slot as booked
• An afternoon booking marks the PM slot as booked
• A full-day booking marks the entire day as booked

Booked days are read from your confirmed bookings each time the calendar is shown, so a booking never overwrites a mark you set yourself. If a booking is cancelled, the day goes back to whatever you had marked underneath it, or to unmarked if you had marked nothing. You never need to manually update your calendar for confirmed or cancelled bookings.