5 Ways Your Appointment-Based Business Is Losing Money

Between managing client appointments and making sure that your books are up-to-date, you’ve got a lot going on. But don’t let a busy schedule prevent you from making sure that your appointment-based business is running as efficiently as possible.

Service-based businesses are unique in the sense that the bottom line is almost entirely dependent on the customer’s experience, and that experience is the sum of countless small interactions.

With so many touchpoints, it’s easy to dismiss small inefficiencies as unimportant. However, not tackling these points of weakness can negatively impact the overall health of your business and your cash flow.

Here are five ways appointment-based businesses commonly lose money, often unaware of how much these areas affect their bottom line:

1. No-Show Appointments

Your customer books time with you. You sharpen your tools, review your client notes and do everything you can to prep yourself to provide an awesome appointment for your customer. Your customer’s appointment time comes and goes, leaving you sitting around waiting, wasting valuable time.

Sound familiar? This is one of the big failures of traditional appointment scheduling.

Perhaps the greatest contributor to small business owner frustration and lost revenue is the classic “No-Show Appointment.” With some studies indicating that upward of 42% of customers skip their appointments, what may appear to be a handful of flakey customers can actually be a much bigger appointment scheduling issue.

Luckily, there are several simple, proven methods for decreasing no-show appointments for your small business:


5 Simple Steps to Getting Better Clients


2. Not Filling Gaps in Your Service Schedule

Time is money – and that is especially true in the instance of appointment-based businesses. Any appointment-based business owner should have mastered what their service schedule looks like at any given time. Using online appointment scheduling software like Acuity Scheduling allows you to easily visualize your schedule and quickly see gaps in your service schedule.

Stumped on the best way to fill in service schedule gaps? Here are a few quick tips:

3. Not Tracking Your Expenses Year-Round

Consistent with having a mastery of your service schedule, monitoring, tracking and truly understanding your expenses is critical to small business success. While keeping a folder full of paper receipts or a spreadsheet titled “2022 Expenses” is a step in the right direction, they’re also antiquated processes that scream “inefficient.”

FreshBooks makes it really easy (and dare we say fun) for service-based businesses to seamlessly track their expenses. Integrations with most financial institutions and the ability to snap photos of paper receipts make expense tracking a fast and easy process.

Once you’re up and running with FreshBooks, take some time every month not only to evaluate your expenses but also to build them into your budgeting. Here are a few quick tips when it comes to expense evaluation:


Your Complete Guide to Reimbursable Expenses


4. Ignoring the Value of Add-Ons in Online Booking

Add-on products or services are exactly how they sound – they’re smaller benefits usually charged at slightly discounted prices when the customer books an appointment. A classic example is offering discounts for recurring projects and services when the customer books the first project or service at cost.

While add-ons certainly should never be considered core to your business success, they’re definitely effective revenue drivers that increase the overall customer lifetime value. When considering the correct strategy for your appointment-based business, be sure to keep in mind the following:

5. Not Making It Easy for Your Customers to Book Time with You

We’ve gone into detail about why an online scheduling platform is a must for any appointment-based business, but it’s worth reiterating here. Good client management starts with making things really simple for your customers, which includes the booking software or appointment scheduling app your business uses.

The more cumbersome it is for an existing or potential customer to book appointments online with you, the fewer appointments you’ll have. So, in the spirit of putting the customer first and making technology work for you, be mindful of the following tips when it comes to reducing friction and inefficiencies in the online appointment scheduling process:


Why Google Calendar Shouldn’t Be Your Default Scheduling Tool


The Bottom Line

Long-term success for appointment-based businesses is all about minimizing inefficiencies and introducing processes that allow you to predictively take control. With a little careful planning and some smart technology supporting your business (online scheduling software), you can easily visualize and tackle points of friction.

Updated August 2021

about the author

Editor-in-Chief, FreshBooks Daniel Reiter is the Editor-in-Chief at FreshBooks. There's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about him. Check him out on LinkedIn or here.

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