How to Customise Microsoft Bookings for a Smarter Business Workflow
If you’ve already set up Microsoft Bookings and mastered the basics, you’ll know it’s a great tool for managing appointments and saving admin time. But in order to take it a step further you need to consider how to customise Microsoft Bookings, to match your brand, streamline your workflows and add more flexibility to how your bookings are handled.
We’ve already previously covered how to enable custom time slots on Microsoft 365 Bookings, one of the most common requests from users who’ve hit the limits of the default setup. In this follow-up, we’ll explore how to make Microsoft Bookings work harder for your business, with some advanced tips and tricks that can take your scheduling system to the next level.
Why customise Microsoft Bookings?
Out of the box, Microsoft Bookings works brilliantly for simple appointment scheduling but it’s intentionally streamlined. That’s great for usability, but it means you’ll quickly notice gaps if you’re managing complex services, multiple team members, or branded customer journeys.
Customising your setup can help you:
- Create a more polished, on-brand experience for your customers.
- Align Bookings with your existing tools like Teams, Outlook, and CRM systems.
- Automate repetitive admin tasks.
- Collect richer data to support reporting and customer insight.
Let’s explore the best ways to approach this.
Branding and user experience: making Bookings feel like your brand
By default, Microsoft Bookings uses a fairly standard Microsoft interface — functional but far from personal. You can make it feel more like your own with a few simple adjustments:
- Add your logo and brand colours: In your Bookings page settings, upload your logo and update the theme colour to match your branding.
- Customise your confirmation text: Tailor the language in your confirmation and reminder emails so it feels consistent with your tone of voice.
- Embed Bookings into your website: Instead of sending clients to an external Microsoft link, embed the booking form directly onto your site. It’s more seamless, professional, and keeps customers within your environment.
If you’re technically confident, you can even apply custom CSS to tweak fonts and layout. This needs a bit of extra setup but with the right know-how, it’s possible to get Bookings looking truly aligned with your brand identity.
Booking rules and logic: going beyond default availability
Microsoft Bookings offers basic control over availability, but what if you want more flexibility? For example like offering different service durations, hidden services, or specific staff rules?
Here are a few ways to go further:
- Custom time slots: You can define specific time slots that don’t follow your default pattern. For example, 15-minute appointments in the morning and 45-minute sessions later in the day. (If you haven’t already read it, check out our guidance on how to enable custom time slots in Microsoft 365 Bookings ).
- Lead and buffer times: Adjust these settings to control how close to the appointment time someone can book, and how much prep time is allowed between bookings.
- Staff-specific rules: If different team members offer different services or availability, assign services to individuals rather than shared calendars.
- Hidden or internal services: You can create private booking pages for staff-only or VIP customers by disabling public visibility.
Taking the time to implement these tweaks can make a big difference to how flexible your system feels day-to-day.
Automating your workflow with Power Automate
Once your booking rules are set up, the next step is making your system smarter. Microsoft’s Power Automate (formerly Flow) is a brilliant way to do this.
You can connect Bookings to other Microsoft 365 tools or external systems and trigger actions whenever a new booking is made. For example:
- Sending a custom confirmation email that pulls details from the booking form.
- Notifying your team in Microsoft Teams when a new appointment is scheduled.
- Logging booking data into SharePoint, Excel, or your CRM for tracking and reporting.
- Automatically following up with a feedback form after each booking.
You can even start with Microsoft’s prebuilt templates or create your own flows using the Bookings connector.
🚀 Power Automate is incredibly powerful but setting up the right logic and permissions can get tricky. If you’d like to connect your Bookings setup to your CRM or reporting dashboard with minimal fuss, we can help you configure it safely and efficiently! Get in touch to start saving time now.
Extending Microsoft Bookings with integrations
If you’re already using other digital tools, whether that’s HubSpot, Salesforce, a bespoke CRM, or a data dashboard, then you can integrate Bookings to automatically sync key information with these internal tools.
There are several routes to do this:
- Direct connectors (via Power Automate as above or Zapier) to send booking data to your CRM or email marketing platform.
- Microsoft Graph API for more advanced custom integrations, where you want to push or pull data dynamically.
- Embedded forms or webhooks if you need Bookings to trigger updates in your own internal systems.
As an example, we’ve worked with businesses who wanted their new Bookings appointments to automatically tag clients in their CRM, generate invoices and auto update internal dashboards in real time. It's enhancements like these that can turn Bookings from a scheduling tool into a real business process asset.
When Microsoft Bookings isn’t enough
It’s a great entry-level tool, but as your business grows you may find you need more control, flexibility, or brand consistency than it can offer. So if you’re starting to juggle multiple locations and complex service rules, then it might be time to go beyond what Bookings can do out of the box.
That’s where our team at Sequel comes in.
We help businesses get the most from their digital tools — whether that means optimising Microsoft 365 to its full potential or building a bespoke booking system completely tailored to your operations and workflows.
Ready to transform your digital solutions? Let’s chat.
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