{"id":374041,"date":"2026-07-19T11:14:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T18:14:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookafy.com\/how-to-set-up-online-booking-for-a-multi-location-business\/"},"modified":"2026-07-19T11:14:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T18:14:17","slug":"how-to-set-up-online-booking-for-a-multi-location-business","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bookafy.com\/sv\/how-to-set-up-online-booking-for-a-multi-location-business\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Set Up Online Booking for a Multi-Location Business"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"max-width:820px;margin:0 auto;padding:20px 16px;font-family:inherit;line-height:1.7;color:#222;\">\n<h1 style=\"font-size:32px;line-height:1.25;margin-bottom:14px;\">How to Set Up Online Booking for a Multi-Location Business<\/h1>\n<p>If you run more than one location \u2014 two clinics, five salons, a franchise with dozens of sites \u2014 the scheduling question usually isn&#8217;t &#8220;which software.&#8221; It&#8217;s &#8220;how do I make one system work across every site without staff double-booking each other, or head office losing visibility into what&#8217;s happening at each location.&#8221; 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&#8217;t handle) the same problem.<\/p>\n<p>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: <a href=\"https:\/\/bookafy.com\/appointment-scheduling-software-for-franchises\/\">appointment scheduling software for franchises &amp; multi-location businesses<\/a>. This guide assumes you&#8217;ve picked (or are trying) Bookafy and just want the setup steps.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"font-size:24px;margin-top:36px;\">Two ways to structure multi-location booking \u2014 decide this first<\/h2>\n<p>Before you touch a single setting, there&#8217;s a real choice to make, and most people don&#8217;t realize they&#8217;re making it:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom:10px;\"><strong>One shared account, staff tagged by location.<\/strong> Every site&#8217;s calendar lives inside the same account. Head office has one login and sees every location&#8217;s bookings, staff, and (where available) reporting in one place. Clients book once, get routed to the right site automatically.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom:10px;\"><strong>Separate accounts per location.<\/strong> 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Most multi-location businesses land on option 1 eventually \u2014 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&#8217;re mid-franchise-rollout and genuinely need separate books per franchisee (their own login, their own data, no shared visibility), that&#8217;s a different setup \u2014 talk to us directly rather than trying to force it through the standard account settings.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"font-size:24px;margin-top:36px;\">The setup, step by step<\/h2>\n<ol style=\"padding-left:22px;\">\n<li style=\"margin-bottom:16px;\"><strong>Add each location as a staff\/resource profile.<\/strong> In Bookafy, a &#8220;location&#8221; isn&#8217;t a separate object you configure once \u2014 it&#8217;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.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom:16px;\"><strong>Set business hours and time zone per profile.<\/strong> Each staff\/location profile carries its own hours and time zone \u2014 important if you&#8217;ve got sites in more than one region, since a shared single-timezone calendar is one of the most common multi-location booking mistakes.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom:16px;\"><strong>Turn on Round Robin or Skill-Based Routing<\/strong> (included on Pro and Pro+). This is what actually makes &#8220;multi-location&#8221; work automatically: a client booking your downtown location gets routed among the staff tagged to that site, instead of every booking landing on whoever&#8217;s link they happened to find.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom:16px;\"><strong>Choose one shared booking page or a page per site.<\/strong> Bookafy supports both \u2014 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).<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom:16px;\"><strong>Reminders and confirmations are already on, at no extra per-location cost.<\/strong> Email confirmations\/reminders come with every plan; SMS reminders come with Pro (1 reminder) and Pro+ (2 reminders) \u2014 as a plan-wide feature, not something you pay for again per site.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom:16px;\"><strong>If a location needs its own branding<\/strong> (common once you have franchisees who want their own name on the booking page, not &#8220;Bookafy&#8221; or your HQ brand), that&#8217;s the white-label option, layered on top of the base multi-location setup \u2014 see our <a href=\"https:\/\/bookafy.com\/whitelabel-online-appointment-scheduling\/\">white-label &amp; reseller guide<\/a> for how that works and who it&#8217;s actually for.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom:16px;\"><strong>Confirm what location-level reporting looks like before you rely on it.<\/strong> Being straight with you here: exactly what&#8217;s in the reporting\/analytics layer today is worth confirming on a live walkthrough with your rep rather than assuming \u2014 we&#8217;d rather you know going in than find a gap after you&#8217;ve built a process around it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<h2 style=\"font-size:24px;margin-top:36px;\">How the other three tools handle multi-location<\/h2>\n<p>If you&#8217;re comparing platforms specifically on this question, here&#8217;s what&#8217;s actually true as of 2026 \u2014 not marketing copy, what each vendor&#8217;s own pricing and help pages say:<\/p>\n<div style=\"overflow-x:auto;\">\n<table style=\"width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;margin:16px 0;font-size:15px;\">\n<thead>\n<tr style=\"background:#f4f4f4;\">\n<th style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;text-align:left;\">Platform<\/th>\n<th style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;text-align:left;\">How multi-location works<\/th>\n<th style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;text-align:left;\">What it costs<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;\"><strong>Bookafy<\/strong><\/td>\n<td style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;\">Staff tagged by location, one account, round robin\/skill-based routing included<\/td>\n<td style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;\">No per-location fee. Pro $7\/user\/mo, Pro+ $11\/user\/mo<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;\"><strong>Calendly<\/strong><\/td>\n<td style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;\">No dedicated &#8220;location&#8221; object; Teams plan groups staff under a shared page. Real org-wide control (multiple teams\/brands under one admin) needs Enterprise<\/td>\n<td style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;\">Teams ~$16\/user\/mo; Enterprise custom, ~$15,000\/yr floor<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;\"><strong>Acuity Scheduling<\/strong><\/td>\n<td style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;\">Separate calendar per location\/staff member on paid tiers (Premium supports up to 36 calendars). True multi-account (separate businesses under one login) is Enterprise-only<\/td>\n<td style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;\">Premium ~$61\/mo; Enterprise custom-priced<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;\"><strong>Setmore<\/strong><\/td>\n<td style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;\">Dedicated &#8220;multiple locations&#8221; feature exists, but it&#8217;s Pro-tier and early release \u2014 you have to contact Setmore support to get it switched on. Appointments, staff, customers and billing stay separate per location; only the login is shared<\/td>\n<td style=\"border:1px solid #ddd;padding:10px;\">Requires Setmore Pro<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<h2 style=\"font-size:24px;margin-top:36px;\">What Bookafy does not do<\/h2>\n<p>In the interest of not overselling this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom:8px;\">It doesn&#8217;t automatically merge existing, already-separate Bookafy accounts into one login \u2014 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.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom:8px;\">It doesn&#8217;t split billing or invoicing per location \u2014 one subscription covers the whole account, one bill.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-bottom:8px;\">It isn&#8217;t a franchise back-office platform \u2014 no royalty tracking, no per-location P&amp;L, no inventory. It&#8217;s booking and routing, not franchise operations software.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2 style=\"font-size:24px;margin-top:36px;\">FAQ<\/h2>\n<div style=\"margin-top:12px;\">\n<p><strong>Do I need a separate Bookafy account for each location?<\/strong><br \/>No \u2014 in most cases one account with staff\/resources tagged by location handles it, with routing sending each booking to the right site automatically.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Is there an extra charge per location?<\/strong><br \/>No. Bookafy prices per user, not per location \u2014 add as many locations as you need without a separate line-item fee for each one.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Can clients pick their nearest location when booking?<\/strong><br \/>Yes \u2014 you can run one shared booking page with a location picker, or a dedicated booking link per site, whichever fits how you market each location.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Can each location have its own branding?<\/strong><br \/>That&#8217;s the white-label option, built for larger and franchise\/enterprise accounts on top of the base multi-location setup \u2014 see the white-label guide linked above for how it works and what it costs.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What if I already have separate accounts for each location today?<\/strong><br \/>Talk to us directly \u2014 combining existing separate accounts into one is a real migration, and we&#8217;d rather scope it properly than have you try to force it through account settings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><script type=\"application\/ld+json\">\n{\n\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\n\"@type\":\"FAQPage\",\n\"mainEntity\":[\n{\"@type\":\"Question\",\"name\":\"Do I need a separate Bookafy account for each location?\",\"acceptedAnswer\":{\"@type\":\"Answer\",\"text\":\"No \u2014 in most cases one account with staff or resources tagged by location handles it, with routing sending each booking to the right site automatically.\"}},\n{\"@type\":\"Question\",\"name\":\"Is there an extra charge per location?\",\"acceptedAnswer\":{\"@type\":\"Answer\",\"text\":\"No. Bookafy prices per user, not per location, so you can add as many locations as you need without a separate fee for each one.\"}},\n{\"@type\":\"Question\",\"name\":\"Can clients pick their nearest location when booking?\",\"acceptedAnswer\":{\"@type\":\"Answer\",\"text\":\"Yes. 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