How to Set Up Online Booking for a Multi-Location Business

If you run more than one location — two clinics, five salons, a franchise with dozens of sites — the scheduling question usually isn’t “which software.” It’s “how do I make one system work across every site without staff double-booking each other, or head office losing visibility into what’s happening at each location.” This is a step-by-step guide to actually setting that up, plus an honest look at how three other tools people compare handle (or don’t handle) the same problem.

Still deciding which platform is right for a multi-location or franchise business in the first place? Read our full comparison guide before you set anything up: appointment scheduling software for franchises & multi-location businesses. This guide assumes you’ve picked (or are trying) Bookafy and just want the setup steps.

Two ways to structure multi-location booking — decide this first

Before you touch a single setting, there’s a real choice to make, and most people don’t realize they’re making it:

• One shared account, staff tagged by location. Every site’s calendar lives inside the same account. Head office has one login and sees every location’s bookings, staff, and (where available) reporting in one place. Clients book once, get routed to the right site automatically.
• Separate accounts per location. Each site runs its own calendar, its own login, its own bill. Simpler to hand off to a single site manager on day one, harder to see the whole business from one place, and it means N logins for N locations when you want a company-wide report.

Most multi-location businesses land on option 1 eventually — often after a year or two of stitching together separate logins for a report that should take five minutes. Bookafy is built around option 1: one account, locations and staff tagged underneath it. If you’re mid-franchise-rollout and genuinely need separate books per franchisee (their own login, their own data, no shared visibility), that’s a different setup — talk to us directly rather than trying to force it through the standard account settings.

The setup, step by step

1. Add each location as a staff/resource profile. In Bookafy, a “location” isn’t a separate object you configure once — it’s built from the staff and resources you add. Create one staff profile per site (or per practitioner working at that site), and give each one its own name, so clients and reports can tell locations apart at a glance.
2. Set business hours and time zone per profile. Each staff/location profile carries its own hours and time zone — important if you’ve got sites in more than one region, since a shared single-timezone calendar is one of the most common multi-location booking mistakes.
3. Turn on Round Robin or Skill-Based Routing (included on Pro and Pro+). This is what actually makes “multi-location” work automatically: a client booking your downtown location gets routed among the staff tagged to that site, instead of every booking landing on whoever’s link they happened to find.
4. Choose one shared booking page or a page per site. Bookafy supports both — a single link where the client picks their location first (good for one main website), or a dedicated booking URL per location (good for local marketing, Google Business Profile listings, or location-specific landing pages).
5. Reminders and confirmations are already on, at no extra per-location cost. Email confirmations/reminders come with every plan; SMS reminders come with Pro (1 reminder) and Pro+ (2 reminders) — as a plan-wide feature, not something you pay for again per site.
6. If a location needs its own branding (common once you have franchisees who want their own name on the booking page, not “Bookafy” or your HQ brand), that’s the white-label option, layered on top of the base multi-location setup — see our white-label & reseller guide for how that works and who it’s actually for.
7. Confirm what location-level reporting looks like before you rely on it. Being straight with you here: exactly what’s in the reporting/analytics layer today is worth confirming on a live walkthrough with your rep rather than assuming — we’d rather you know going in than find a gap after you’ve built a process around it.

How the other three tools handle multi-location

If you’re comparing platforms specifically on this question, here’s what’s actually true as of 2026 — not marketing copy, what each vendor’s own pricing and help pages say:

What Bookafy does not do

In the interest of not overselling this:

• It doesn’t automatically merge existing, already-separate Bookafy accounts into one login — if four locations each already have their own standalone account, combining them is a migration our team needs to help with, not a settings toggle.
• It doesn’t split billing or invoicing per location — one subscription covers the whole account, one bill.
• It isn’t a franchise back-office platform — no royalty tracking, no per-location P&L, no inventory. It’s booking and routing, not franchise operations software.

FAQ