Quick Start: Your First Booking

This tutorial walks you through the fastest path to getting a real booking in Driive. By the end, you'll have created a service, booked an appointment yourself, seen what your customers experience on your booking page, and worked a request from your Inbox to a completed appointment.

Time to complete: Under 10 minutes.

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What you'll need

• A Driive account (see Creating Your Account if you haven't signed up yet)
• Completed onboarding (see Onboarding Walkthrough)

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Step 1: Create an appointment type

An appointment type defines a service your customers can book. Let's create one now.

1. In the sidebar, go to Setup > Appointment Types.
2. Click the New Appointment Type button.
3. Fill in the basics:
   • Name — Choose something customers will understand, like "Roof Inspection," "AC Service Call," or "Free Estimate."
   • Description — A sentence or two explaining what the service includes. This appears on your booking page.
   • Duration — How long the appointment typically takes (e.g., 1 hour).
4. Assign a team that can handle these appointments:
   • Select Existing — Pick an existing team, or
   • Create New — Name your team and add anybody who can do these appointments.
5. Click Create to create the appointment type.

Keep it simple for now. You can always add booking questions, configure buffer times, and fine-tune settings later. The goal right now is to get your first booking flowing.

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Step 2: Book your first appointment yourself

The fastest way to see an appointment come to life is to book one yourself — just like you would for a customer who calls in.

1. In the sidebar, click Appointments, then click Schedule Appointment.
2. Move through the four steps:
   • Schedule appointment — Pick the appointment type you just created.
   • Select a time — Choose the date, start and end time, and who's assigned. An appointment you book yourself always gets a time and at least one assigned user.
   • Customer — Search for an existing customer, or create a new one. For this test, add yourself.
   • Appointment details — Confirm the service address, answer any booking questions, and add private tech notes for your crew.
3. Confirm, and Driive creates the appointment as Scheduled — it's on your calendar immediately.

Tip: Because you picked a time, the appointment skips straight to Scheduled. Appointments created without a confirmed time — for example, from a request — start at Needs Scheduled until you pick a slot or the customer books one.

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Step 3: See what your customers experience

Now let's look at the other door into Driive: your booking page. Grab your booking link (see Booking Links and Sharing) and open it in a new tab or an incognito window.

What the customer sees:

1. Service selection — They pick the service they need (or answer your routing questions, if you use them).
2. Booking questions — Any questions you configured (e.g., "Describe the issue," "Upload a photo") appear here.
3. Service address — They enter where the work happens, so Driive can check it against your service area.
4. Submit — If everything checks out, they're taken straight to a page to pick their own time and the appointment is created Scheduled. If something needs your review — approval required, a low lead score, out of area — they see a friendly "we'll be in touch soon to get you scheduled" message instead.

Go ahead and submit a test booking using your own info. This creates a real request in your Driive account so you can see the next step in action.

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Step 4: Work the request from your Inbox

Every submission on your booking page creates a request in Driive.

1. In the sidebar, click Inbox.
2. If your test booking needed a human (or you skipped picking a time), the request is waiting at the top with a reason chip — like Needs information or Needs approval — telling you why.
3. Click it to open the request. Review what the customer said, their contact details, and their answers — everything saves automatically as you fill in gaps.
4. Click the action button: Schedule (or Approve & Schedule if it was flagged). Driive creates the appointment and takes you to it so you can pick a time with Find a Time — or click Share Booking Link to let the customer choose their own.

If your test booking sailed through and you picked a time as the customer, there's nothing to triage — the appointment is already sitting in Appointments as Scheduled. That's the Inbox working as designed: it only shows you what needs you.

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Step 5: Complete the appointment

Your test appointment is scheduled and on your calendar. Now let's close the loop, just like you would with a real job.

Once the job is done:

1. Open the appointment and click Mark Complete.

That's it — you've just walked through the entire Driive lifecycle: request, Inbox, appointment, done.

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You're up and running

In under 10 minutes, you've:

• Created an appointment type for one of your services
• Booked an appointment yourself
• Experienced the booking flow from your customer's perspective
• Worked a request from the Inbox to a scheduled appointment
• Completed an appointment

Recommended next steps

Now that you've seen the basics, here's where to go to get the most out of Driive:

What to do	Where to learn more
Master your triage queue	Inbox
Add more services	Appointment Types
Invite your team	Users and Teams
Connect your calendar	Integrations
Customize booking questions	Appointment Types
Set up a routing form	Booking Pages
Embed booking on your website	Deploy and Share
Configure lead scoring	Appointment Types
Explore the full dashboard	Dashboard Overview

Have questions? Check the Key Concepts and Glossary for definitions of any terms you're unsure about.