Receiving bookings¶
A booking starts as a request¶
When a customer books you, nothing is confirmed yet. The job arrives as a pending request, and it waits for you. You either accept it or decline it.
This is deliberate. Auto-confirming every booking would commit you to work you have not seen and may not have room for.
Two places to respond¶
In the Provider Portal¶
Open app.markabaai.com → Provider. Pending requests sit at the top with Accept and Decline buttons; everything else is in the history table below.
The queue refreshes itself — when you come back to the tab, when you return to the app on your phone, and on a timer while you are looking at it. You do not need to reload, and you will not lose your place while it updates.
From WhatsApp¶
If we have your WhatsApp number on file, a new booking also arrives as a WhatsApp message with Accept and Decline buttons. Tapping one does exactly what the portal buttons do — the booking is confirmed or declined immediately.
The reply has to come from your registered number
We check that the tap came from the WhatsApp number on your listing. A message from any other number is ignored — silently, so that nobody can probe your bookings by messaging us. If your business number changes, tell us or the buttons will stop working.
If you have not given us a WhatsApp number, bookings still arrive normally; the portal is just the only place you will see them.
What happens when you accept¶
The booking becomes confirmed. The customer is notified. The slot stays held for them.
What happens when you decline¶
The booking becomes declined, the customer is told, and the slot is released immediately for someone else to book. Declining costs you nothing but that job — it does not take the slot out of service.
Declining promptly is genuinely better for you than leaving a request pending. A customer waiting on silence assumes the worst and books elsewhere anyway.
You cannot respond twice¶
Once you have accepted or declined, that is final — a second response is refused rather than quietly overwriting the first. This matters if two people at your front desk are both looking at the queue: whoever acts first wins, and the second gets a clear error rather than flipping the answer.
The same applies across channels. If you accept in WhatsApp and then open the portal, the request is already gone from the pending list; that is correct, not a bug.
Finishing the job¶
Accepting is not the end. When the work is actually done, mark the booking completed in the portal's history table. See Reviews & completed jobs — completing is what invites the customer to review you.
Walk-in customers¶
A customer who simply turns up can be logged from the portal. You enter the job and the price you agreed, and it is recorded against your business like any other job. Walk-ins do not take an online slot.
Customers who book without an account¶
Some businesses can take bookings from people who are not signed up at all — they book straight from your public page and get a confirmation code by SMS.
This is off by default and we enable it per business, so if you want it, ask us. It is worth asking for if you get a lot of walk-up trade from a QR code or a shop-front sign.
A guest booking reaches your queue exactly like any other one. The only difference is on the customer's side: instead of an account, they have a code they can use to check their status.
Behaviour checked against Markaba AI v0.181.0 · reviewed 2026-09-22