Contacts and the meeting lifecycle

Bookly keeps a contact for every person who books, joins a waitlist or fills a routing form: one row per email per workspace, with a name, company, phone, tags, free-form notes, a follow-up date and a stage (lead → active → won → lost). Everything that happens with that person lands on the contact's timeline: bookings and their answers, confirmations, cancellations and reschedules, completed meetings and no-shows, every email Bookly sent, form answers, notes and stage changes.

Admin → Contacts lists everyone (search, filter by stage), and each contact page shows the timeline, upcoming meetings and the editable details. Booking rows link to the attendee's contact. A first completed meeting moves a lead to active automatically; the other stages are yours to set.

Home#

At the top of Home a row of cards sums up the day, each a link to the page that owns it: This week (meetings still to come this week and the next three), Since your last visit (new bookings and cancellations since you last opened Home; reloading within half an hour keeps the same starting point), Needs attention (requests to accept, recaps to review, people to follow up), Your tasks (open, overdue, due today; owners and admins also see the team's count), Contacts (added this week, follow-ups due) and, for owners and admins, Payments this month (paid bookings summed per currency, or a prompt to connect Stripe). Members see their own meetings; owners and admins see everyone's. Every card loads on its own. The cards roll out behind the home_dashboard flag (a "Beta" badge shows while it is in beta).

Admin opens on Home: today's meetings with their briefings and join links, booking requests to accept (or answer by email instead, which withdraws the request), contacts to follow up (a due follow-up date, or a lead that has been quiet for a week; snooze pushes it out a week), your open tasks with overdue ones flagged, and a note when people are waiting on a waitlist. Members see their own bookings; owners and admins see the workspace.

Executing the outcome#

• Proposal / Payment request / Follow-up buttons on a contact page send a templated email (edit the templates under Admin → Settings → Emails; placeholders {name} {company} {host} {amount} {payLink} {bookingUrl}). A payment request with Stripe configured includes a Checkout link for the amount. All three set the next follow-up date so Home nudges you again; Home's "Follow up" link opens the contact with the follow-up composer ready.
• CRM sync (Admin → Settings → Integrations → CRM sync): with a HubSpot private-app token or a Pipedrive API token, contacts and stage changes are mirrored to the CRM and meeting summaries and sent proposals become notes on the CRM contact. Sync is best-effort and never blocks a booking.
• Webhooks and API: contact.created, contact.stage_changed, meeting.captured and task.created events, plus GET/POST /api/v1/contacts and GET /api/v1/tasks, let any other tool react to what happens in Bookly.

Pre-meeting briefing#

Every upcoming booking has a briefing for the host: who the person is, what happened before (last meeting, open threads, no-shows), what they asked for in the booking questions, and what to prepare. Open it from Admin → Bookings → Brief or from the contact page; it is also included in the host's reminder email closest to the meeting.

With ANTHROPIC_API_KEY set (model via ASSISTANT_MODEL, default claude-sonnet-5) the briefing is written by the assistant from the contact's timeline. Without a key it is a plain, deterministic summary of the same facts, so nothing depends on the model. Briefs are cached for a day and can be regenerated.

Auto-capture#

Event types on Bookly video (except end-to-end encrypted ones, which are peer-to-peer and never transcribed), and on Google Meet, Teams and Zoom when the notetaker is configured (docs/integrations.md), can transcribe the call: set Auto-capture to Ask the attendee when booking (a checkbox on the booking form) or Always (a notice on the booking form, in the confirmation email and in the calendar invitation; booking is the agreement). Either way the booking stores the consent and when it was given (capture_consent, capture_consent_at), the notetaker posts a notice in the meeting chat when it joins and to each person who joins later, and everything the assistant writes from the transcript is labelled AI-generated in the admin. Consent law differs by place (all-party consent in several US states and most of Europe); the terms make the host responsible for it. On Bookly video both sides see a notice in the call, transcription starts by itself once you and the attendee are both in the room, and Daily transcribes with speaker labels (the meeting page also streams the live lines to Bookly so speakers are named). Calls are transcribed multilingually by default (Deepgram Nova-3 with language: "multi"): people can switch between languages mid-call, every line is tagged with the language it was spoken in, the languages spoken are shown on the booking page, and the recap is written in the language the host spoke most. Deepgram's multilingual mode covers English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Hindi and Japanese; for a single other language set settings.capture.language to its code (e.g. he), which transcribes with Nova-2 in that language only. On Meet, Teams and Zoom a notetaker bot joins the call instead, announced in the confirmation email, and streams the transcript to Bookly as people speak. Either way, when the call ends you get a "Transcript ready" email. When the assistant is configured, the transcript becomes a recap on the booking page: summary, whether the call covered what the client asked for when booking, decisions and action items for both sides with the transcript moment they came from, open questions, objections and risks, a next step, a stage suggestion and a follow-up draft. Every item is one click: create the selected tasks, move the stage, send the follow-up. New recaps show under "Recaps to review" on Home and arrive by email with the highlights. Open action items carry over into the next session's briefing. A recap for the attendee (neutral summary, decisions, who does what by when) can be edited and sent from the same page; untick action items you would rather keep internal. Attendees see on their manage page that the call is transcribed and can delete the transcript themselves. Without the assistant, the transcript can still be read, deleted, or used as the source for manual capture.

In cloud mode auto-capture is a Pro feature with a monthly budget of transcribed minutes (Pro 300 per workspace, 5 hours; Team 480 per member, 8 hours, pooled across the workspace), shown as hours in the UI; the budget shows under Billing. Past it, transcription continues at $3 an hour, billed by the minute, on the next invoice unless the host switches overage off, in which case it does not start once the budget is used up (docs/cloud.md). Transcripts are deleted after the retention period (90 days by default; settings.capture.retentionDays), summaries and tasks stay. Bookly video needs a paid Daily plan (transcription billed by Daily per participant minute); external calls need a Recall.ai account (billed per bot hour).

Notes in the call#

On Bookly video, a member in the call (signed in, so they join as the room's owner) gets a Notes panel, behind the meeting_notes flag and on Pro and up (meetingNotes; Bookly video starts on Pro). Notes are private to whoever wrote them and save themselves as you type. Each note keeps the moment it was written, so the recap lines it up with what was said then. Mark moment (in the panel and the call's controls, or ⌘/Ctrl+Shift+M, even while typing) drops a flagged timestamp you can label later.

After the call:

• The recap reads the notes with the transcript. The assistant is told which lines are yours: it quotes them as your notes in the summary, treats a commitment ("send the proposal by Friday") or a marked moment as a strong signal for an action item, and lets your notes win where they disagree with the transcript. Each action item says whether it came from your notes, the transcript or both, and so does the task it becomes. A call that was not transcribed still gets a recap from the notes alone when the assistant is configured.
• The notes stay on the booking (Your notes from the call), where you can still edit them; Regenerate on the recap uses the edits.
• They land on the contact's timeline as a note, about ten minutes after the meeting ends; later edits update that same entry.

Saving the first note is in the activity log (meeting.notes_started); the autosaves after it are not. Notes are part of the workspace export with the booking.

After the meeting: capture#

On a booking's page (Admin → Bookings → Notes), paste your notes or a transcript and press Capture. With the assistant configured it extracts a summary, decisions, action items with due dates (yours and theirs), a next step, a stage suggestion and a follow-up email draft; without it, your notes become the summary and every line starting with - becomes a task. Tasks live on the booking and the contact, can be completed or removed, and an overdue task is nudged once by email (and text, if enabled). With the task board on, they also land on Admin → Tasks (tasks.md). A clear outcome moves the contact's stage (won / lost / active). The follow-up draft can be edited and sent from Bookly with your address as reply-to; it lands on the timeline like every other email.

Proposals, payment requests and follow-ups#

From a contact's page, Proposal, Payment request and Follow-up open a form prefilled from the workspace templates (Settings → Proposal, payment and follow-up emails) with the placeholders filled in; {bookingUrl} in a follow-up becomes a link to your booking page. Edit freely, then Preview email shows the exact branded message the contact will receive, with the recipient and subject; nothing is sent until you confirm. A payment request creates a Stripe Checkout link for the amount when you send, and the email carries a Pay button. Every send lands on the contact's timeline and sets a follow-up date.

These are commercial emails from the host, so each one carries the workspace's postal address (Settings → Postal address; set it before sending, CAN-SPAM requires it) and an unsubscribe link, plus List-Unsubscribe / List-Unsubscribe-Post headers so Gmail and the like show their own unsubscribe button. A contact who unsubscribes (contacts.email_opt_out) is marked on their page and on Home, the composer refuses to send, and a timeline note records it; a host can opt them back in on request, or opt someone out who asked in person. Booking confirmations and reminders are unaffected, the attendee asked for those by booking.

Timeline v2 and guest replies#

Behind the timeline_v2 feature flag (Console → Flags; Beta while it is in beta), a contact's timeline is grouped by day under date dividers, newest first: bookings, emails sent, guests' replies, notes, tasks, recaps, payments and stage changes. Meetings link to their booking, recap and transcript; sent emails show their content in an accordion; a guest's reply sits under the email it answers, with the host's answers in the same thread. Clicking an entry opens it in a side pane (?entry=<id>): a meeting shows the whole booking, an email its thread with the quoted text available. The page loads the latest window (about 30 entries, never splitting a day) and Show earlier loads the next; after the first click the following windows load as you scroll. Pages are keyset-paginated on (created_at, id) over the index contact_events (contact_id, created_at, id), so a contact with years of history costs the same per page as a new one.

Guest replies (Pro and up; self-hosted when configured). Every email Bookly sends a contact (confirmations, reminders, follow-ups, recaps, proposals, payment requests, timeline replies) carries a signed Reply-To on the inbound domain, r-<entry>-<signature>@<INBOUND_EMAIL_DOMAIN>. The guest replies as usual; Resend receives it and calls POST /api/webhooks/resend (email.received, Svix-signed with RESEND_WEBHOOK_SECRET); Bookly fetches the message, cuts the quoted history ("On … wrote:", > lines, Outlook's header block), files it under the email it answers, clears the contact's follow-up date (they answered), logs contact.reply_received, and notifies whoever sent the email ("Guest replied"). Its email channel forwards the reply with the guest as Reply-To, so the host still has it in their inbox and can answer from there or from the timeline (Reply, logged as contact.email_replied; the email threads in the guest's mail client). Auto-replies are ignored, a repeated delivery is a no-op, and a forged address fails its signature. Attachments are kept in the contact's folder (docs/files.md). On Free, or when the inbound domain is not set up, replies go to the host's own address as before. Settings → Emails → Guest replies shows where replies go and lets owners and admins switch it off (settings.guest_replies.disabled): new emails then carry the sender's own address, while replies to emails sent while it was on still reach the timeline (and are forwarded), so nothing is lost when the setting or the plan changes. Every email on the timeline is also the contact's conversation in Messages, where the team writes to them and leaves internal notes (docs/messages.md); Open in Messages on the contact's page opens it.

Setup (self-hosting): in Resend, add receiving on a subdomain (e.g. reply.example.com) and put its MX record in your DNS (the subdomain keeps your main mail where it is); create a webhook for email.received pointing at https://<your host>/api/webhooks/resend; then set INBOUND_EMAIL_DOMAIN and RESEND_WEBHOOK_SECRET (and RESEND_API_KEY, used to fetch the message).