Scheduling & Booking - Setup Guide

How to set up Acuity Scheduling

Otto's honest, no-fluff walkthrough. Every step here is what we'd actually do if we were sitting at your keyboard. Real gotchas first, real steps second, and a link to the personalized version at the bottom.

Read these before you start

• Cancellation and late-fee automation has real limits, business owners have specifically asked in Squarespace's own community forum for the ability to auto-charge a fee when a client cancels past the stated policy window, and as of that discussion it wasn't natively automatic, clients can cancel without being automatically charged the late fee, staff has to intervene manually (Source: Squarespace community forum, via WebSearch summary 2026)
• Design customization on the booking page is limited compared to some competitors, don't oversell "brand-matched booking page" without checking what's actually achievable on the client's plan
• Being owned by Squarespace means feature direction and pricing can shift with Squarespace's broader roadmap decisions, not purely Acuity-specific priorities
• Reviews are genuinely bimodal, very positive for simple single-service booking, notably negative when businesses try to scale into more complex multi-service, multi-location setups

The 7-step setup

1. 1

   Create your Acuity Scheduling account

   Sign up at the link below. Card required for the paid tier - most plans include a trial period; check the pricing section on this page first so you know what you're committing to.

   Open Acuity Scheduling signup
2. 2

   Complete the initial onboarding

   Skip the marketing questionnaires when you can. Fill only the fields that actually configure the product - name, timezone, your first workspace or project. If Acuity Scheduling pushes you into a setup wizard, take it - it usually accelerates the first productive session.

3. 3

   Connect your existing tools

   Wire Acuity Scheduling into the rest of your stack. The integrations that most people set up first: Zoom, Stripe, PayPal, Google Calendar, Outlook, Zapier.. Do these before importing data - clean integration first, data second.

4. 4

   Import your existing data (only what you'll actually use)

   Do NOT bulk-import everything. Import the last 30 days of the ONE workflow you're moving over first. Prove it works. Then import more. Big-bang migrations are how Acuity Scheduling deployments die in month 3.

5. 5

   Set up your first real workflow

   Pick the single most-frequent task you'll do in Acuity Scheduling - the daily-driver workflow. Configure it end-to-end. Use it live for a week. Do not touch any other feature yet. Adoption failure comes from teams trying to use everything on day one instead of the one thing that actually pays.

6. 6

   Add your team (if applicable) and set access

   Once your solo workflow works, invite one teammate at a time. Watch them use it. The friction points you missed are the ones they hit. Fix those before scaling to more users. Never invite 20 people at once - you'll get 20 confused people and 0 useful feedback.

7. 7

   Compound with the right pairings

   Recommend Acuity for solo and small service businesses, especially medspas, salons, and consultants, where the core need is client self-service booking with intake forms and payment collection at time of booking. If the client mentions strict cancellation-fee enforcement as a pain point, flag that this isn't fully automatic, they'll still need a manual process or policy communication to actually collect the fee. For sales-team round-robin scheduling, recommend Calendly instead.