Getting Started
What is Calso?
A tour of what Calso does, the four things you set up before your first booking, and where the rest of the help center picks up.
Calso is where the scheduling, payment, and record-keeping side of your practice lives, so that the work you actually trained for is the part you spend your day on.
You set up what you offer and when you're free. Calso turns that into a booking page you can send anyone. When someone books, it takes the payment, writes the session into your calendar, emails both of you, and keeps the client's history in one place.
What Calso does for you
Calso sits between your calendar and the people who want time with you, and it handles the parts of that exchange you would otherwise do by hand.
It publishes a booking page that shows only the times you are genuinely free, because it reads your existing calendar before it offers anything. It takes payment at the moment of booking, so you are not invoicing after the fact. It writes each confirmed session back to your calendar and emails the confirmation to both of you. And it keeps everything about a person — their bookings, their payments, their answers to your intake questions, your notes on them — on one client record instead of scattered across four apps.
You can go further when you want to: sell blocks of sessions up front, run workshops and courses with several people in the room, send automatic reminders and follow-ups, and put the same booking flow on your own website. None of that is required to take a first booking.
What it replaces
- Back-and-forth emails to find a time that works
- A separate invoice, sent and chased by hand
- Session notes in one app, payment history in another
- Reminders you send yourself, when you remember
- A link that shows only the times you're actually free
- Payment taken at the moment of booking
- Notes, bookings, and payments on one client record
- Reminders that go out on their own
The one word to learn first
An event type is one thing a client can book — a 60-minute intake call, a 30-minute check-in, a free discovery chat. It carries its own length, its own location, and its own price. Learn this one word and the rest of the product falls into place, because almost every setting you go hunting for later turns out to live either on an event type or on your availability.
Everything else Calso says — workspace, booking, package offering, group session, and the handful of words that mean different things on different screens — is defined in the Calso glossary. It is worth a skim before you go much further.
Getting to your first booking
The shortest useful path is four steps, in this order. Each links to a full guide.
- Connect your calendar
Calso reads your existing calendar so it never offers a time you are already busy, and writes new sessions back to it — see connect your calendar.
- Set your availability
Tell Calso which hours you are open on each weekday. This is the outer boundary that every event type books inside, and a new workspace starts on Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 17:00 until you change it — see set your weekly availability hours.
- Create an event type
Name the thing a client can book, set its length and price, and choose where it happens — see create your first event type.
- Share your booking page
Send the link. The first booking that lands proves the whole chain works end to end — see find and share your booking links.
What you can change later
Almost nothing in setup is a one-way door. Prices, session lengths, weekly hours, descriptions, and where a session happens can all be edited after clients have started booking, and bookings already on the calendar keep the terms they were made under.
The one thing to choose deliberately on day one is your Booking Page URL — the short address at the end of your public link. Change it later and every link you have already shared stops working, because there is no forwarding from the old address.
Where to go next
If you do not have an account yet, start with sign in to Calso for the first time. If you are already looking at a dashboard, the first real step is connecting your calendar — it is what everything else assumes, and it takes about a minute.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a website to use Calso?
No. Every workspace gets its own booking page at a Calso address, and that link works on its own — in an email signature, an Instagram bio, or a text message. If you do have a website, you can embed the same booking flow into a page on it.
Can clients book without creating an account?
Yes. A Calso booking page takes someone from picking a time to a confirmed booking without asking them to register, so there is no sign-up step in the way. If you switch on the client portal, existing clients also get a signed-in area where they can see their upcoming sessions and any package credits they still hold — but booking never depends on it.
What do I have to set up before Calso can take a booking?
Four things: a connected calendar so Calso knows when you are already busy, your weekly availability hours, at least one event type describing what a client can book, and your booking link shared somewhere a client will see it. Taking payment is optional — an event type priced as Free accepts bookings whether or not you have connected Stripe.