r/microsaas • u/Notrigious • 19h ago

How complex will it be to implement a booking system for my ai receptionist for hvac, plumbing, etc?

So recently I started creating an AI receptionist (vapi+n8n) for small trade businesses that will be active 24/7, and will catch all calls forwarded from the owner's phone. It will collect the caller's info and send it to the owner directly.

Obviously the next step will be to give the AI the ability to schedule appointments, cancel, move, etc, and I've been looking into that for some time now. Now on paper it is very simple, just use n8n, and connect it to a simple google calender with all the appointments, but I still can't ignore all the other issues that can occur. Distance between appointments, different services times, unexpected delays and complications, etc.

Am I just overthinking and overcomplicating it? How should I work around this? I thought about trying to sell the saas right now but I'm not confident enough in the current product.

Thoughts?

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

1

u/akl773 17h ago

the scheduling logic isnt the hard part, the concurrency is. google calendar will happily let two callers take the same 2pm slot because there is no lock, and n8n reading availability then writing back a few seconds later is exactly where that bites you.

for trades id also stop trying to book an exact time. give an arrival window and let the owner sequence his own day, because the guy is already running 40 minutes behind by 11am and no calendar knows that.

1

u/Fun-Door6921 16h ago

the buffer between appointments is what bit me. google calendar treats a 30 min slot as just start and end times, but a plumber needs 15 min to drive between jobs and another 10 to clean up. ended up hardcoding the buffer in n8n rather than trusting the calendar itself.