If you own a car repair shop, beauty salon,  language school, or other service company you probably face the same problem every day: how to effectively manage business operations? Even though digitalization is present in almost every area of ​​life, many small and medium-sized companies still rely on traditional appointment management methods, such as paper calendars, notebooks, or makeshift Excel spreadsheets. This means that, instead of taking advantage of the possibilities offered by today’s technology, many business owners struggle with the problems these traditional tools cause:

• Confusion and errors – Errors such as double bookings, lack of real-time updates, difficulty locating information, and the resulting confusion.
• Waste of time – Every change to your schedule requires manual entry and communication of information, creating unnecessary delays.
• Customer dissatisfaction – Having to call, send messages, or reconfirm appointments multiple times can discourage customers from using your services.

Long story short, unorganized reservation management is not only an inconvenience – it can result in financial losses. Companies that implement digital reservation systems have increased operational efficiency and the number of customers. Process automation also allows for work optimization, a reduction in the number of errors, and a better user experience. Doesn’t it sound nice? And what if I told you that getting a tailored booking calendar app is easier than you might expect?

Existing reservation systems – A step forward, but with some limitations

The first option is to use an off-the-shelf solution, such as SimplyBook.me or Booksy. Such tools can help you streamline the appointment scheduling process and help organize work, but the limited adaptability to the specific needs of the company often reduces their overall effectiveness. For example, in a car repair shop, reservations must take into account different resources (mechanics, parts, equipment), as well as different time models (e.g. repair time depending on the car model), and off-the-shelf software usually can’t fully meet such specific needs. This limitation doesn’t render such solutions completely unusable, but it forces businesses to adapt their processes to the principles of the system when, really, things should work the other way around. 

An additional challenge is control over data and branding. When using off-the-shelf solutions, companies often have to rely on the provider’s infrastructure, which requires them to store customer information there and makes it difficult to build a consistent brand image. Moreover, many such systems operate on a subscription model, which means rising costs as the business grows. 

Due to these factors, dedicated solutions are getting more and more popular. The growing demand has convinced many companies to turn towards platforms such as Mendix, which allow them to create tailored applications easily, without adapting to the limitations imposed by external systems.

Why is Mendix worth considering?

With Mendix, creating a tailored booking calendar app is easier than ever before. In just a few days, you can have a fully functional solution that opens up the following possibilities:

• It will allow your clients to independently book appointments online, without having to call or send messages.
• Each change in the schedule will be automatically updated in a common system, available on all devices (PCs, phones) – both for you and your employees.
• The system will send automatic reminders to clients, reducing the number of uncancelled appointments.
• Your business will attract more customers thanks to easy integration with popular booking platforms and social media.

Sounds like a big change? It is, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. 

In this article, I’ll present an example of a simple booking system made entirely in Mendix that will increase the efficiency of your business, reduce organizational chaos, and improve the comfort of both your customers and employees. It’ll be a system for a car workshop company called “Pretius’s Garage”.

Keep in mind it’ll be a basic solution with only the bare minimum of necessary features, but creating it won’t require months of work by a team of programmers or a huge budget – Pretius can help you develop it in days or weeks at most (and you always have the option to expand it later).

A software calendar for booking appointments – An example of a Mendix-based application

Let’s start by defining the key features the example booking app should offer and which challenges need to be addressed. There are several things to note: 

• The app has to improve information management in the organization. In my chosen case (car workshop), it’s necessary to manage tasks performed by staff at workstations. For this purpose, I need a transparent and personalized UI (user interface). 
• If I want to make the system available for both internal and external users (employees and customers, respectively), I need to restrict access to certain resources and functionalities so that customers can’t use employee-specific features. Mendix lets you create new roles in the application with just a few clicks and then assign them the appropriate permissions. This allows me to limit access to selected pages and application data for customers and administrators. This way, I can create a separate home page for each role.
• To expand the possibilities and reach of my imaginary business, I will also need to integrate the app with external systems. 

Creating a landing page for customers

So let’s start with the basic element of every application, the “landing page” that welcomes the customers. 

Using available ready-made components, I can build a fully legible and functional page presenting the most important information. The page creator developed by the Mendix team speeds up our work, supports the process of creating page elements and simplifies adding and configuring individual views. There’s no need to write dedicated code to adapt the page exactly to your needs – for example, the page presented below was built without writing a single line of code.

Another advantage of Mendix is ​​that the available components are adapted to display on different resolutions. So, if your clients want to use the mobile version of the application, they will be greeted by a fully readable and functional page – Mendix will automatically adjust the way it’s displayed to the device resolution. Here’s a version of the same page as seen on a mobile device.

Service Reservation Form

Since the main purpose of my example application is to support the business in managing reservations, let’s take a look at creating forms that can be used for this. I have created a window with a simple form, built only from ready-made fields provided by Mendix. As you can see, different types of fields are available – from a regular text field, through a checkbox, to a drop-down calendar.

In addition, Mendix offers complete control over what values ​​can be entered in individual fields. A good example of this is the input Available hours, where I want to provide the user with only specific time intervals. Using Microflow, I can dynamically provide data to this field based on the employee’s availability at the selected time. As a result, the user will be able to make a reservation only for one of the predefined dates, which will help me avoid potential overlap of order dates.

Back office for administrators

Customers can already make reservations, but what about simplifying business management? It’s all about handling data, and since the application can be precisely tailored to my specific needs, I decide what information is valuable and what I would like to present. 

But what if there are no components required to meet your needs? Fortunately, the Mendix team also considered such an eventuality. If the platform is missing an element, the programmers can use the provided tools to add code and implement the required functionality (for more information on creating custom widgets, check out my Mendix React Client: Introduction and main changes compared to Dojo article). 

Below is an example of a dashboard for a business owner that you can create without having to use any custom widgets. All the elements used here are ready-made components available on the platform – you just have to configure them. After a bit of work, I can present even the most complex statistics about my imaginary business.

However, the benefits of using Mendix for creating booking apps don’t end there. Not only does it allow you to quickly deliver a fully functional app that will support you in your daily work, but you can also easily integrate it with other systems. Mendix allows you to use numerous widgets for this purpose that are constantly being created and developed by the community gathered around it. 

For example, let’s take the calendar visible in the lower right corner of my dashboard. It helps with the management of pending tasks, but what if I wanted to integrate it with another service, such as Google Calendar? All I need to do is install the Calendar Event Link widget, which allows me to achieve exactly this effect. After completing the required configuration, each event I add will also appear in my Google calendar.

Dynamic appointment management

You already know how a Mendix-based app can simplify daily business supervision. But what about analyzing tasks performed by employees and needs reported by customers?

Since my application was designed for a company running a car repair shop, the main goal is to enable future customers to make reservations. To do this, I need to enable them to choose employees who will fulfill their needs and workstations where these employees will be able to perform individual orders.

In both cases, I simply need to create new pages in the application, on which I will add the logic of displaying a list of all elements, adding new ones, and managing existing ones. Setting up both lists – available employees and workstations – works the same way. Below is a proposal of how it might look (this is the default Mendix look, you can customize it if you want):

Once this data is delivered to the application, not only will customers be able to use it to create new reservations, but I will also be able to see what reservations they are making. For this purpose, I can create a new view that will display a calendar of orders placed by customers based on selected filters – by employee and workstation.

Presenting data this way also allows me to create numerous actions that will let me manage reservations. For example, one possibility is to modify a specific event after clicking on it, or to change the hours by stretching the selected tile. Of course, this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg – one of many ways to present information. Mendix’s biggest advantage is ​​that it allows you to customize the application exactly to your needs, and this is one of many examples that showcase this flexibility.

Conclusion

Developing a dedicated app for booking appointments and managing your business with Mendix helps you streamline your daily work and increase the scalability and competitiveness of your business. Thanks to the flexibility of low-code platforms, you have full control over the functionalities, integrations and presentation of the application, which allows you to create solutions tailored to the dynamic needs of the market – you have control over nearly every element of your business’s digital ecosystem (unlike with ready-made systems). Mendix also allows for quick modifications and development of the application as the company grows.

If you’re interested in using Mendix and want to make the best out of its advanced features, reach out to us at hello@pretius.com. We’re a certified Mendix partner with a proven expertise in the low-code field and over a decade of experience using such platforms in various scenarios. We’ll analyze your inquiry and get back to you within 48 hours (such preliminary consultations are always free).

And if you need more information on Mendix, check out some of the other articles on our blog:

1. Mendix tutorial: Start making apps using a powerful low-code platform
2. Mendix React Client: Introduction and main changes compared to Dojo
3. Build custom CRM using just Mendix and Excel spreadsheets 
4. eCommerce automation: A modern approach based on the Mendix low-code platform