Hi community members,

We have developed a workaround for approval-based booking using Zoho Creator and Zoho Bookings! This provides a temporary solution as we work on the native feature, and it's useful for anyone needing an approval workflow when confirming appointments.

Solution overview

1. Intake form via Zoho Creator 

Zoho Creator serves as the intake form where customers can submit their booking requests by providing details, such as:

  • Name

  • Email

  • Contact number

  • Preferred service

  • Desired date and time slots

2️. Scheduling and booking management via Zoho Bookings  

Zoho Bookings acts as the scheduling engine in the background, handling:

  • Staff onboarding

  • Working hours configuration

  • External calendar and video conferencing integrations

  • Event creation and appointment management.

3️. Real-time data sync via API  

This solution leverages API integration between Zoho Creator and Zoho Bookings to ensure real-time data synchronisation. When customers fill out the intake form, it dynamically fetches and displays available slots from Zoho Bookings based on their selection.

Since we are using APIs, any changes made in Zoho Bookings (such as staff availability or service modifications) will be instantly reflected
in the Zoho Creator form, eliminating concerns about outdated information.

Prerequisites for the workaround  

  • Zoho Bookings: Any paid plan

  • Zoho Creator: Standard plan or higher

How to access this solution  

Zoho Creator allows you to export applications as DS files, making it easy to share and deploy solutions. We have attached the DS file for this solution so you can easily download and import it into your Zoho Creator account.

  • Download the DS file here: DS file code

  • Guide to import the DS file into Zoho Creator: Guide

Watch the working demo of this solution here: Solution demo

How it works 

1️. Customer appointment request form  

  • The Zoho Creator intake form allows customers to select their workspace, service, date, time zone, and preferred time slot.

  • The Zoho Bookings API dynamically fetches the available services and slots based on customer selections.

2️. Admin notification and approval dashboard  

Once a customer submits a request, admins receive an email notification with access to the approval dashboard.

Admins can approve requests using two methods:

Auto-assign staff  

  • If admins do not have a preference for assigning staff, they can simply click the Auto-Assign button.

  • The system checks the first available staff member for the selected service.

  • If the first staff member is available, the appointment is automatically assigned to them.

  • If the first staff member has an existing appointment for the day, the system will automatically move to the second staff member and check their availability for the approved date and time.

  • If the second staff member is also unavailable, an error message is displayed, prompting the admin to manually select a staff member.

  • This mechanism ensures that staff assignments are distributed efficiently every time the Auto-Assign button is clicked.

Manual staff assignment  

  • Admins can manually select a specific staff member before approving the appointment.

  • If the selected staff member is unavailable, the system notifies the admin to choose another staff member.

3️. Deny function and automation options  

If the appointment is denied, various automated actions can be configured, including:

  • Sending email notifications to customers about the cancellation

  • Notifying other admins or specific users

  • Triggering custom workflows based on business needs

Key highlights of the solution  

  • No need to manually configure complex workflows—everything is ready to go.

  • Simply pass the Workspace ID and Staff ID while making API calls.

  • The system fetches all required booking details dynamically using Zoho Bookings API.

How to retrieve IDs from Zoho Bookings  

Workspace ID  

  1. Navigate to Zoho Bookings and open the required workspace.

  2. Retrieve the Workspace ID from the URL.

Example:

https://bookings.zoho.in/?app_version=new#/home/dashboard/2209960000******/bookings-page?clview=false


     3. Workspace ID: 2209960000******


Staff ID  

  1. Open the Staff section and select the required user profile.

  2. Retrieve the Staff ID from the URL.



Watch this short video on where to replace the Workspace ID: Workspace ID video 

Watch this short video on where to replace the Staff ID: Staff ID video

Important notes on payment handling  

This solution does not currently handle payment processing. Since appointment requests require approval before confirmation, the payment function is not included by default.

However, if you need to integrate payment processing, here is a possible approach: Zoho Invoice and Zoho Books integration

You can connect Zoho Bookings with an invoicing system like Zoho Invoice or Zoho Books using Zoho Flow or Zapier.


How it works:

1️. When an admin approves an appointment, the booking is confirmed.

2. The system automatically generates an invoice based on the booked service.

This is just one way to integrate payments into this solution. If you have specific payment requirements or alternative workflows in mind, feel free to share them, and we will check the feasibility of implementation.


Need further customization?  

Note: This solution is in its initial stage of development, and we will refine it wherever possible based on new ideas, feedback, and better implementation approaches. Your suggestions are always welcome.

If you require additional automation or a custom approval/denial process, feel free to reach out.

Contact us at: hello@zohobookings.com

    • Sticky Posts

    • Zoho Bookings know-how: A hands-on workshop series

      Hello! We’re conducting a hands-on workshop series to help simplify appointment scheduling for your business with Zoho Bookings. We’ll be covering various functionalities and showing how you can leverage them for your business across five different sessions.

    • Announcing: custom color palette + free workshop

      Hello everyone, We're excited to share new feature in Zoho Bookings—a color palette within booking page themes. You'll find this option under Manage Bookings > Workspaces > Booking Page Themes. You can customize the color of every element in your booking page and even alter the transparency of your background image. Please note that this is a paid feature included in the Basic and Premium plans. At the moment, it's available only under the Modern Web theme. This means you can create billions (7,

    • Complete walk-through of Zoho Bookings (video)

      Save time for both you and your customers. Use Zoho Bookings, the appointment scheduling app from Zoho, to free yourself from email and paper-based scheduling. Zoho Bookings can give you a common calendar by syncing multiple calendars, including yours and your staff's. Your customers can book a time convenient for them, and pay for services, through your website or the customizable webpage features available in Zoho Bookings. They'll also get emails reminding them about their appointments and any

    • New Features: Service Availability and staff booking page themes!

      Dear All,  Want a dedicated schedule for your one-on-one services? How would it feel to have one-on-one services open for consultations only during certain times? You need a superpower to make that happen and we give it to you - Service Availability is

    • Zoho Bookings has a new pricing - Pay per user

      Dear customers, Businesses around the world use Zoho Bookings. Customers have booked 1.5 million appointments and over 200K online meetings using Bookings. We are only set to cross more milestones, thanks to your support. We are excited to introduce to

    • Recent Topics

    • Cant Save Gauge on Creator Page

      How to Save Gauge on Creator Page see movie https://vimeo.com/1116410860?share=copy#t=0

    • Update application by uploading an updated DS file

      Is it possible? I have been working with AI on my desktop improving my application, and I have to keep copy pasting stuff... Would it be possible to import the DS file on top of an existing application to update the app accordingly?

    • Granular Email Forwarding Controls in Zoho Mail (Admin Console and Zoho One)

      Hello Zoho Mail Team, How are you? At present, the Zoho Mail Admin Console allows administrators to configure email forwarding for an entire mailbox, forwarding all incoming emails to another address. This is helpful for delegation or backup purposes,

    • Change Currency symbol

      I would like to change the way our currency displays when printed on quotes, invoices and purchase orders. Currently, we have Australian Dollars AUD as our Home Currency. The only two symbol choices available for this currency are "AU $" or "AUD". I would

    • Auto Capitalize First Letter of Words

      Hi I am completely new to ZOHO and am trying to build a database. How can i make it when a address is entered into a form field like this: main st it automatically changes is to show: Main St Thank You

    • Follow-up emails via Workflow Automation not staying in the same thread

      Dear Zoho Support Team, I am currently using Workflow Automation in Zoho Campaigns to send follow-up emails. In my test case, I noticed the following behavior: All emails in the automation have the same subject line. If the follow-up email is sent within

    • Client Script refuses to set an initial value in Subform field

      I tried a very simple, 1 line client script to set a default value in a custom subform field when the "Add Row" button is clicked and the user is entering data. It does not work - can someone tell me why? ZDK documentation suggests this should be doable.

    • Archiving Contacts

      How do I archive a list of contacts, or individual contacts?

    • How do I filter contacts by account parameters?

      Need to filter a contact view according to account parameter, eg account type. Without this filter users are overwhelmed with irrelevant contacts. Workaround is to create a custom 'Contact Type' field but this unbearable duplicity as the information already

    • Send / Send & Close keyboard shortcuts

      Hello! My team is so close to using Zoho Desk with just the keyboard. Keyboard shortcuts really help us to be more efficient -- saving a second or two over thousands of tickets adds up quickly. It seems like the keyboard shortcuts in Desk are only for

    • Zoho Social - Post Footer Templates

      As a content creator I often want to include some information at the end of most posts. It would be great if there was an option to add pre-written footers, similar to the Hashtag Groups at the end of posts. For example, if there is an offer I'm running

    • Zoho Expense - The ability to add detail to a Trip during booking

      As an admin, I would like the ability to add more detail to the approved Trips. At present a requestor can add flights, accommodation details and suggest their preferences. It would be great if the exact details of the trip could be added either by the

    • Simplified Call Logging

      Our organization would like to start logging calls in our CRM; however, with 13 fields that can't be removed, our team is finding it extremely cumbersome. For our use case, we only need to record that a call happened theirfor would only need the following

    • Week date range in pivot table

      Hello, I need to create a report that breakouts the data by week.  I am using the pivot table report, and breaking out the date by week, however the date is displayed as 'Week 1 2014' format.  Is there anyway to get the actual dates in there? ex. 1/6/2014-1/12/2014 Thanks,

    • Help Center IFrame Issue

      I have had a working Help Center on my website using an iframe for a while. But now for some reason the sign in page gets a refused to connect error. Can someone please help. If I go to the url manually it works correclty

    • Staff rules

      Hi! Do you people know what are the default staff rules when a new booking is created? We have two staff members in my team (me as the admin, and my employee). As we share the same services, I'm wondering how Zoho will pick the staff for new apointments.

    • Comment Templates

      Is it possible to add a template option for comments? We have some agents in the process who's responses require a pre-formatted layout. It would be incredibly handy to have a template for them where they can insert the template and then add their responses

    • [ZohoDesk] Improve Status View with a new editeble kanban view

      A kanban view with more information about the ticket and the contact who created the ticket would be valueble. I would like to edit the fields with the ones i like to see at one glance. Like in CRM where you can edit the canvas view, i would like to edit

    • Adding Markdown text using Zoho Desk API into the Knowledge Base

      Hi Zoho Community members, We currently maintain the documentation of out company in its website. This documentation is written in markdown text format and we would like to add it in Zoho Knowledge Base. Do you know if there is REST API functionality

    • An Exclusive Session for Zoho Desk Users: AI in Zoho Desk

      A Zoho Community Learning Initiative Hello everyone! This is an announcement for Zoho Desk users and anyone exploring Zoho Desk. With every nook and corner buzzing, "AI's here, AI's there," it's the right time for us to take a closer look at how the AI

    • Shared values: From classroom lessons to teaching moments in customer service

      While the world observes Teachers’ Day on October 5, in India, we celebrate a month earlier, on September 5, to mark the birth anniversary of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a great teacher, renowned scholar, educationist, and advocate for empowerment.

    • Export to excel stored amounts as text instead of numbers or accounting

      Good Afternoon, We have a quarterly billing report that we generate from our Requests. It exports to excel. However if we need to add a formula (something as simple as a sum of the column), it doesn't read the dollar amounts because the export stores

    • Image Upload Field | Zoho Canvas

      I'm working on making a custom view for one of our team's modules. It's an image upload field (Placement Photo) that would allow our sales reps to upload a picture of the house their working on. However, I don't see that field as a opinion when building

    • Create a list of customers who participated in specific Zoho Backstage events and send them an email via Zoho CRM

      How to create a list of customers who participated in specific Zoho Backstage events and send them an email via Zoho CRM? I was able to do a view in CRM based on customer that registered to an event, but I don't seems to be able to include the filter

    • Custom Button Disappearing in mobile view | Zoho CRM Canvas

      I'm working in Zoho CRM Canvas to create a custom view for our sales team. One of the features I'm adding is a custom button that opens the leads address in another tab. I've had no issue with this in the desktop view, but in the mobile view the button

    • Zoho Desk blank page

      1. Click Access zoho desk on https://www.zoho.com/desk/ 2. It redirects to https://desk.zoho.com/agent?action=CreatePortal and the page is blank. Edge browser Version 131.0.2903.112 (Official build) (arm64) on MacOS

    • Clearing Fields using MACROS?

      How would I go about clearing a follow-up field date from my deals? Currently I cannot set the new value as an empty box.

    • I hate the new user UI with the bar on the left

      How can I reverse this?

    • Constant color of a legend value

      It would be nice if we can set a constant color/pattern to a value when creating a chart. We would often use the same value in different graph options and I always have to copy the color that we've set to a certain value from a previous graph to make

    • Office 365 and CRM mail integration: permission required

      Has anyone run into this weird problem? My email server is Office 365. When I try to configure Zoho CRM to use this server, a Microsoft popup window opens requesting user and password. After entering that, I get a message in the Microsoft window saying

    • Field Not Updating in FSM Script - Service and Parts module.

      Dear Team, I am reaching out regarding a script I have implemented in Zoho FSM to automate the calculation of the End of Service date based on the End of Sale date in the Service and Parts module. Overview of the script: Fetches the End_of_Sale__C and

    • Question regarding import of previous deals...

      Good afternoon, I'm working on importing some older deal records from an external sheet into the CRM; however, when I manually click "Add New Deal" and enter the pertinent information, the deal isn't appearing when I look at the "Deals" bar on the account's

    • Client Script also planned for Zoho Desk?

      Hello there, I modified something in Zoho CRM the other day and was amazed at the possibilities offered by the "Client Script" feature in conjunction with the ZDK. You can lock any fields on the screen, edit them, you can react to various events (field

    • One person/cell phone to manage multiple accounts

      Hi. I have a personal Free account to keep my own domain/emails. Now I need to create a Business account to my company's own domain, but I have only one mobile phone number I use to everything. How do I do to manage this? Can I manage a Free domain and

    • Tracking KPIs, Goals etc in People

      How are Zoho People users tracking employee targets in People? For example, my marketing assistant has a target of "Collect 10 new customer testimonials every month". I want to record attainment for this target on a monthly basis, then add it to their

    • Zoho Desk: Ticket Owner Agents vs Teams

      Hi Zoho, We would like to explore the possibility of hiding the ‘Agents’ section within the Ticket Owner dropdown, so that we can fully utilise the ‘Teams’ dropdown when assigning tickets. This request comes from the fact that only certain agents and

    • CRM limit reached: only 2 subforms can be created

      we recently stumbled upon a limit of 2 subforms per module. while we found a workaround on this occasion, only 2 subforms can be quite limiting in an enterprise setting. @Ishwarya SG I've read about imminent increase of other components (e.

    • Can not Use Attachment Button on Android Widget

      this always pops up when I touch the attach button on android widget. going to settings, there is no storage permission to be enabled. if I open the app, and access the attach feature there, I can access my storage and upload normally.

    • Can I add Conditional merge tags on my Templates?

      Hi I was wondering if I can use Conditional Mail Merge tags inside my Email templates/Quotes etc within the CRM? In spanish and in our business we use gender and academic degree salutations , ie: Dr., Dra., Sr., Srta., so the beginning of an email / letter

    • Zoho Notebook Sync problem

      I'm facing a problem with syncing of notebook on android app. It's not syncing. Sometimes it syncs after a day or two.  I created some notes on web notebook but it's not syncing on mobile app. Please help!!!!

    • Next Page