How to Collect Intake Information at Booking — Using the Notes Field Effectively

Most booking forms collect a name and an email address. That is enough to confirm an appointment exists — but it tells you nothing about the person arriving. For many service providers, the difference between a useful booking and a useful booking is the few lines a client writes before they arrive: what they are hoping to achieve, what they have tried before, what context you need to make the session worthwhile.

CalNative Booking has a notes field — a free-text textarea — that most users leave disabled because it is off by default. Alongside it are fields for phone number and company name, also off by default. Switching them on, writing a useful placeholder, and understanding where the information ends up is a ten-minute configuration task that meaningfully improves how prepared you are before every appointment.

The available form fields

CalNative Booking’s form has six fields. Two are always present and cannot be removed — First name and Email. The remaining four are optional and can be switched on or off individually:

To enable any of these, go to Settings → CalNative Booking → Form Fields. Each field has a Show toggle, a Required toggle, a Placeholder field, and a Label field. You can configure all four independently for each field.

Using placeholder text as a guided prompt

The placeholder on the Message field is where most of the practical value is. By default it just says “Message” — a blank prompt that most people will either skip or fill with something too brief to be useful.

A specific prompt produces specific answers. The placeholder disappears the moment a client starts typing, so it functions as a brief instruction rather than a label. Use it to tell clients exactly what you want to know:

What are you hoping to get out of this session? Any context about your situation is helpful.

That is more likely to produce a useful paragraph than a field labelled “Message.” The more specific the prompt, the more useful the answer — but keep it short enough to read at a glance. A placeholder that runs to three sentences will be ignored.

You can also rename the field label. The default label is “Message” — but “About you”, “Your goals”, “Notes for your session”, or “Tell me about your situation” all frame the field more usefully depending on your context.

Where the information goes after booking

When a client completes a booking, the information they submitted appears in three places:

1. The Google Calendar event description. The confirmed booking creates a Google Calendar event immediately. The event description includes the client’s full name, email, phone (if collected), company (if collected), and notes — formatted and ready to read before the session. You can open the calendar event from any device and have everything in front of you.

2. Your notification email. The email you receive when a booking is made includes all the same fields. The default notification body uses these tokens:

Name: {full_name}
Email: {email}
Phone: {phone}
Company: {company}
Notes: {message}
Date: {date}
Time: {time}

You can edit the notification email template at Settings → CalNative Booking → Emails to add, remove, or reorder these tokens. If you only collect name and email, remove the phone, company, and notes lines from the template so the notification stays clean.

3. The bookings log in WordPress admin. Every booking is stored in CalNative Booking → Bookings. The notes field appears as an expandable row below each entry. The log is searchable by name, email, and company — useful if you want to look up a client’s intake notes before a follow-up session without opening Google Calendar.

Placeholder examples by profession

The right prompt depends entirely on what you need to know before the session. Here are practical examples for different service types:

Therapist or counsellor

What brings you here, and what are you hoping to work on? There are no right or wrong answers — anything you share helps me prepare.

Business or life coach

What is the main challenge you are facing right now, and what does success look like for you?

Personal trainer

What are your main fitness goals? Please mention any injuries or areas I should know about before we start.

Nutritionist or dietitian

Briefly describe your current diet and what you'd like to change or improve.

Solicitor or legal consultant

Please summarise the matter you need advice on. The more detail you include, the more useful our consultation will be.

Web designer or developer

Briefly describe your project: what it is, who it is for, and what stage you are at.

Pilates or yoga instructor (private sessions)

What are your goals for private sessions, and do you have any injuries or physical limitations I should know about?

Photographer (consultation booking)

What kind of shoot are you enquiring about, and when is it? Any details about what you have in mind are helpful.

Required vs optional

Whether to make the notes field required is a genuine trade-off. Requiring it ensures you always have intake context before the session — but it also adds friction for clients who are not sure what to write, or who prefer to explain themselves in the call.

A practical approach for most service providers: leave the notes field optional but write a placeholder that makes completing it feel natural and low-effort. A client who sees “Briefly describe your situation — anything helps” is more likely to write something than a client who sees a blank textarea labelled “Message.”

Fields like Phone and Company are worth making required if you actually need them before the session. Phone is useful when you want the option to confirm or reschedule by text. Company is useful for B2B consultants who need to know the organisation context before the call. If you collect the field out of habit but rarely look at it, do not require it — empty optional fields add no friction; mandatory fields that produce resentment do.

A note on keeping forms short

More fields is not always better. A booking form that asks for name, email, phone, company, and a detailed intake paragraph introduces hesitation at the moment a client is ready to commit. If you need detailed intake information, the consultation itself is the right place for it — the booking form should collect only what you need to prepare for that conversation, not replace it.

For most solo practitioners, the most effective combination is: name, email, and one well-written notes field. That gives you a person and a context. Everything else can follow in the session.