Bexus Booking

Online booking and a diary that matches how a barber shop actually runs.

Customers book online. The phone still rings and people still walk in. Bexus Booking puts all three in the same day, and is straightforward enough to set up yourself between appointments.

In development · preparing for pilot The software is built and running on password-protected staging. There is no public release, no production service and no paying customers. Pilot places are being arranged one at a time.

Enquire about a pilot place What works today

Where it actually is

Built and running, but not released

Software gets described as “launching soon” for months at a time. Here is the same information in three columns, so what exists, what is planned and what is not being claimed all arrive together.

Working now

Built, tested and running on protected staging.

  • Online booking, from choosing a service to a confirmed appointment
  • Customer accounts, created during the booking rather than before it
  • Customers viewing, moving and cancelling their own appointments
  • Self-service setup for a shop owner, end to end
  • A day-by-day diary with online, telephone and walk-in appointments
  • Blocked time for lunch, training, holidays and anything else
  • Customers, Team, Services and Shop settings as full screens
  • Each shop’s data isolated from every other shop, in the database

Planned, not built

Named here so nobody buys them by assumption.

  • Appointment reminders — the preference is stored, nothing is sent
  • Multiple locations under one business
  • A public read-only demonstration of the booking page and diary
  • Online payments and deposits — the model is not yet decided
  • SMS and WhatsApp messaging
  • Reporting
  • Logo and shop-photo uploads

Not claimed

Things this page could say and will not.

  • No customers are paying for this. There is no price list yet.
  • No production service exists — only protected staging.
  • No usage figures, booking counts or time-saved claims.
  • No reviews or ratings. There is nobody to have written one.
  • No screenshots of live shops. The visuals below are labelled schematics.

Why a page for something unfinished. Because a pilot needs shops that know exactly what they are getting. Every list above is kept in step with the software itself — when reminders start sending, or one login can hold several locations, those lines move column and this sentence changes with them.

Who it is for

Barber shops first, and shops that intend to grow

Bexus Booking for Barbers is the first version of one configurable platform. Other service trades follow later — the same software configured differently, not a copy of it.

Independent barbers

One chair or several, run by the person who also cuts hair. Setup has to be something you finish yourself between appointments, not a project.

Small multi-location businesses

Shops that will eventually need more than one address under one business. Bexus Booking is built as one configurable platform with that in mind — but multiple locations under a single login are planned, not built.

Multiple locations under one login are planned

Anyone still running the book on the counter

Phone, walk-in and messages are how most of these shops actually take work. The diary treats all three as normal, rather than as exceptions to an online-only system.

For your customers

Book in under a minute, change it without ringing you

Most missed bookings are not lost customers — they are customers who rang while you had clippers in your hand. The booking page answers at eleven at night as readily as it does at eleven in the morning.

  1. 01

    Pick a service

    The shop’s own services, with their real length and price. What is offered is what that shop actually does.

  2. 02

    Pick a barber and a time

    Times are worked out for the service and the barber chosen, against that barber’s hours in the shop’s own timezone — so a slot on offer is a slot that fits.

  3. 03

    Confirm, and get an account

    The account is created in the same step as the booking, without leaving the page. No sign-up wall before a customer can see whether you have a Tuesday.

  4. 04

    Change it without ringing you

    A customer can see their appointments, move them or cancel them, up to a cut-off before the appointment that the shop’s settings control.

  • One account works across every Bexus Booking shop the customer uses
  • Moving an appointment uses the same availability rules as booking it
  • Two appointments can never be given the same barber and time — the database refuses it, not just the screen
  • The account holds the customer’s own details; it carries no shop’s data with it

Setting up

Six steps, done by you, in one sitting

There is no implementation project and no data migration to sit through. You create an account and work forward until your booking page is live — and during the pilot, you do not have to do it alone.

  1. Create your account

    Email and password. Nothing to install, no app store, no card.

  2. Build the shop

    Name, description, colour and web address. Start from ten common barber services and edit them, or type your own.

  3. Put yourself in the diary

    You are the first barber. Add your working hours; add the rest of the team when you are ready.

  4. Look at your real booking page

    Not a mock-up — the actual page a customer would see, before anyone can reach it.

  5. Take a test booking

    Clearly marked as a test, so your first real appointment is not sitting next to a rehearsal you cannot tell apart.

  6. Publish, and open the diary

    The shop goes live at its own address when you say so — and can be unpublished again just as easily.

Pilot shops do not do this on their own. Setup happens on a call with the person who built it: your services, your team and your hours go in together, and the first week is watched rather than left to see what happens.

The working day

One diary, whichever way the booking arrived

A booking system that only knows about online bookings just adds a second place to look. Telephone and walk-in appointments go in the same diary, marked as what they are.

Schematic of a shop day: three chairs across, hourly times down, showing where online, telephone, walk-in and blocked entries appear.
Time Chair oneChair twoChair three
09:00 Online Cut & finish Free Telephone Skin fade
10:00 Walk-in Beard trim Online Cut & finish Free
11:00 Free Online Cut & finish Blocked Lunch
12:00 Blocked Lunch Telephone Restyle Online Cut & finish
Schematic of the day view — a diagram of how the diary is laid out, drawn for this page. It is not a screenshot, and no shop, barber or customer in it is real.

How each entry is labelled

  • Online Booked by the customer on your booking page.
  • Telephone Taken by whoever answered, into the same diary — not a second list.
  • Walk-in Someone who came through the door. Recorded as what it was.
  • Blocked Lunch, training, a dentist. Time nobody can book into.

What you can do to a slot

  • Take a booking on behalf of a customer
  • Move an appointment to another time or barber
  • Mark it complete
  • Mark a no-show
  • Cancel it
  • Block out time so nothing can be booked into it

The diary opens on today in your shop’s own timezone and moves day by day. Blocked time is a genuine entry in the day, so nothing can be booked into it — including by a customer online while you are cutting.

Running the shop

Customers, Team, Services and Shop settings

Four screens that between them cover everything a shop needs to change about itself — without an email to support and without waiting for anyone.

Customers

Everyone who has been in, searchable by name, email or telephone — including a number typed as 07700 900123 when it was saved as +44 7700 900123. Appointment history, cancellation and no-show counts, and a private note only your shop can see.

  • Nothing is ever merged automatically by name
  • The private note never appears on anything a customer can see

Team

Add a barber by name alone — no email address invented for someone who does not need to log in. Reorder them, set individual hours, decide who is bookable online and which services each one does.

  • Working in the diary and having a login are separate things
  • Access to the shop’s admin is granted separately, by the owner

Services

Start from templates or write your own. Prices, durations, ordering, archiving and per-barber assignment — and every row states plainly whether it is actually bookable.

  • A service nobody performs is shown as unbookable, not silently offered
  • Changing a price never rewrites what past appointments cost

Shop settings

Name, description, colour, web address, timezone, opening hours, your booking rules, and publishing. Plus a history of what was changed in the shop and when.

  • Publish and unpublish are yours, and take effect immediately
  • The booking rules are your shop’s, not fixed by us

Changes it will not let you make by accident

The point of a booking system is that appointments people were promised still happen. These are edits the software declines — and it names what is standing in the way rather than saying “not allowed”.

If you try to What happens
Removing a barber who has appointments ahead Refused, and it names the appointments in the way
Removing the last bookable barber Refused — the booking page would have nothing to offer
Shortening hours past an appointment already booked Refused, for the shop’s hours and a barber’s alike
Archiving a service with bookings still ahead of it Refused
Changing the shop’s timezone once the diary has anything in it Refused, with the reason — every appointment’s time depends on it
Changing a price or a duration Allowed. Past appointments keep the price and length they were booked at

Your data

Every shop is fenced off from every other shop

Bexus Booking runs many shops on one platform, which is what makes it affordable. That only works if separation is a property of the database rather than a promise about the code.

Schematic: each shop’s records sit behind a boundary the database enforces, so a query that does not name a shop returns nothing rather than returning another shop’s rows.

Separation is enforced by the database

Every shop’s rows are fenced off by PostgreSQL row-level security, not by application code remembering to filter. A query that forgets which shop it is for returns nothing, rather than returning somebody else’s.

The application has no privileged account

The database roles are least-privilege and none of them is a superuser. The web application cannot run migrations, and the account that can cannot serve web traffic.

Isolation is tested, not assumed

Cross-tenant access is part of the automated test suite and was proved in a browser as well: one person ran their own shop and booked as a customer at another, without gaining any access to it.

The database is not reachable from the internet

It publishes no port at all. The staging service sits behind a password on every path, on a hardened server in an EU data centre.

Customer notes stay inside the shop that wrote them

A shop’s private note about a customer is absent from every payload the customer or any other shop can receive.

Encrypted, off-server backups will be in place before any real customer data exists — that is a condition of a pilot starting, not a task to be done afterwards.

On any screen

Built for a phone, because that is where it gets used

Customers, on a phone

Booking is a phone job. The whole journey — service, barber, time, account, confirmation — is built for a small screen first, and the same page works on a laptop.

You, wherever you are standing

The diary and every management screen work on a phone as well as a desktop. There is no screen you can only reach from a computer in the back office.

Checked, not hoped for

Desktop and mobile journeys are run as part of the automated browser tests, and layout and colour-contrast problems have been fixed as defects rather than logged as taste.

Planned, and honest about it

The two things people assume are already there

Both of these are on the roadmap and neither of them works today. They get their own section rather than a footnote, because a shop that assumed otherwise would find out at the worst possible moment.

Planned — nothing is sent today

Appointment reminders

A customer can say they would like reminders, and that preference is stored with its date and can be withdrawn at any time. Nothing sends anything. There is no email or text provider connected, and no reminder has ever gone out.

What has to exist first

  • A sending provider chosen and connected
  • Addresses and numbers verified, so a reminder cannot go to someone who never gave it
  • Scheduling, retries and a guarantee the same reminder is not sent twice
  • Withdrawal honoured everywhere, immediately

Planned — one login administers one shop today

Multiple locations

Bexus Booking is one configurable platform running many separate shops, which is the groundwork multiple locations need. What does not exist yet is one owner holding several locations under a single login, with staff, services and a diary per location.

What has to exist first

  • One account holding several shops, with access set per location
  • A diary that can be read one location at a time or across all of them
  • Services and team shared or separated by location, as the business prefers

Coming shortly

A demonstration you can click through, shortly

A read-only demonstration of the customer booking page and the owner diary is being prepared: real screens, filled with example data, that nobody can change and that contain nobody’s personal information. It is not published yet, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

Until it is up, the honest alternative is a walkthrough. Ask, and you get a live screen-share of the real software rather than a slide deck.

Ask for a walkthrough Or go straight to the pilot

Pilot

Pilot places, arranged one at a time

This is the stage where the software gets shaped by the people using it. A pilot shop gets set up personally, and what does not work gets fixed rather than explained.

Free while it is a pilot

No card, no subscription and no price list yet. When there is a price, you will hear it before it applies and you will not be moved onto it silently.

Set up with you, not sent to you

Your shop, services, team and hours get set up together on a call, and your first week is watched rather than left alone.

A direct line to the person who wrote it

Not a support queue. The reply comes from the person who can change the software, and often does the same week.

You can stop, and take your data

If it is not helping, say so. Your data is yours, exportable, and nothing about a pilot obliges you to continue.

What you should expect

  • It is new software. You will find things, and finding them is the point.
  • There are no reminders yet — you will still confirm appointments the way you do now.
  • There are no online payments yet. You take money exactly as you do today.
  • Nothing is publicly advertised as live until a pilot shop says it is ready.
Enquire about a pilot place hello@bexus.co.uk

The button opens your email client with the questions already written in. Answer what you can — a couple of lines about your shop is a perfectly good enquiry.

Straight answers

The questions a barber actually asks

Can I use it in my shop today?

Not as a public product, no. It runs on protected staging and there is no production service yet. What you can do today is take a pilot place, which means it gets set up with you and watched closely while it beds in.

What does it cost?

Nothing during the pilot, and there is no published price because there is not an honest one to publish yet. Pricing gets set once real shops have used it for long enough to know what it is worth.

Do my customers have to download an app?

No. It is a web page. They book from a link, and the account they end up with is created during that booking rather than before it.

Will it send reminders?

Not yet. A customer can record that they would like them, and that preference is stored and can be withdrawn — but nothing sends anything, and no provider is connected. It is a planned piece of work, not a switch waiting to be flicked.

I have two shops. Does that work?

Not under one login yet. Each shop can run as its own separate shop today, but one owner holding several locations together is planned rather than built. If that is what you need, say so in your enquiry — it moves up the list when a real business is waiting on it.

What happens to my data if I stop?

You take it. It is yours, it is exportable, and there is no contract that makes leaving awkward. That is the same principle everything else Bexus Systems builds is sold on.

Who is actually building it?

Bexus Systems — the same practice that builds the portals, dashboards and workflow tools described elsewhere on this site. Bexus Booking is the first product built for many businesses rather than for one.

Bespoke work for other businesses Packages you can buy today How other Bexus builds are going