Intake questions are the things you need to ask before you can do the work — a clinic’s “any allergies?”, a salon’s patch-test consent, a tutor’s “which exam board?”. They are asked during the booking, stored against it, and a consent question that is not ticked stops the booking outright. All of this is in the free wordpress.org plugin.
Where: WP Admin → Tiger Booking → Settings → Intake & Consent. The tab appears when the Appointments engine is active, since the appointment booking flow is what renders the questions.
Field types
Each question has a label, optional help text, a required flag and a type:
- Text and Textarea — short answers and longer notes.
- Select, Radio and Checkbox — a choice from options you define. Multiple checkbox answers are stored as one comma-separated value.
- Number, Date, Tel and Email — typed inputs.
- Consent — a tickbox that records agreement. Treated specially; see below.
Questions are ordered, and each has an active flag so you can retire one without deleting it and without losing the answers already given.
Scoping: whole engine, or one service
A question is attached either to a whole booking engine or to a single service.
A booking collects the engine’s questions first, then the chosen service’s — so a general health declaration can apply to everything you do, while “have you had a patch test in the last 48 hours?” is asked only for colour work. There is no need to duplicate the general ones onto every service.
When customers answer
The questions appear in the booking flow, before the booking is submitted — not afterwards by email. That is the point: you get the answers at the moment you can still refuse or reschedule.
Validation happens on the server, not just in the browser:
- A required question left blank refuses the booking with “Please answer ‘…’ to continue.”
- A required consent question left unticked refuses it with “Please agree to ‘…’ to continue.” An unticked consent box must block the booking, because otherwise you would be holding a record claiming consent that was never given.
- Optional questions left blank are simply not stored, rather than stored empty.
What is recorded
Each answer is stored against the booking with the question’s key, the label as it was worded at the time, the field type, and the answer. Storing the label alongside the answer is deliberate: if you later reword or delete the question, the record still shows exactly what the customer was asked. A consent record has to outlive the question that produced it.
Consent answers are normalised to a plain yes or no, so a record is unambiguous rather than depending on how the browser submitted a tickbox.
Answers appear on the booking’s detail view in the admin, can be included in notification emails, and come out with your booking exports.
What is not recorded
Worth being precise about, if you are relying on this for a compliance requirement: the stored record is the question, the answer and the booking it belongs to. It does not capture the customer’s IP address or a separate consent timestamp of its own — the timing you have is the booking’s. If your regulator expects IP and a distinct timestamp, this is not that.
Deleting a question
Removing a question takes it off future bookings. Answers already collected are kept, because a consent record must survive the question being retired.
Troubleshooting
There is no Intake & Consent tab.
The tab is shown when the Appointments engine is active, because that is the flow which renders the questions. Check Settings → Modules.
My questions don’t appear in the booking form.
Check the question is active, and check its scope — a question attached to one service only shows when that service is chosen.
A customer says they can’t complete the booking.
A required question or an unticked required consent box refuses the submission and names the question in the message. If a question is unreasonable to require, make it optional.
I reworded a question and old records look inconsistent.
They are correct. Each answer keeps the wording that was on screen when it was given, so historical records show what was actually asked rather than what you ask now.
Can customers upload a document with their answers?
Customer file uploads — ID and document capture at booking time, with a signed viewer for you to read them back — are part of the Tiger Booking Pro add-on and are not in the free plugin. Intake questions themselves are free and complete.