Setting Up Your Spatiko Account
Set up Spatiko step by step — business profile, branding, service catalog, booking form, coverage, and Stripe payments — from fresh account to first booking.
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This guide walks you from a brand-new Spatiko account to a booking page you can actually share. It follows the same six steps as the Build your booking page checklist on your Dashboard — the card that tracks your setup progress, links each step to the right settings page, and disappears once everything is done. You can follow it in the app and use this guide for the “why” behind each step.
What a fresh account already includes
When you sign up (with email and password, or with Google) and confirm your name, Spatiko quietly sets up a working business for you:
- A business, named after you — something like Alex’s Photography. Rename it any time in Settings → General.
- Sensible regional defaults — currency, measurement units (square feet or square meters), and timezone, guessed from your browser. Worth double-checking before you price anything, since size-based pricing uses those units.
- A starter order form called Listing Services. It’s live but empty — nothing can be booked from it until you attach services in step 4.
- You, on the photographer roster, accepting orders with default weekday hours (Monday–Friday, roughly 9 to 5) and a 24-hour minimum booking lead time. You’ll replace those with your real hours in step 5.
- The free plan, so you can build out everything below before deciding whether a paid plan makes sense.
The checklist card also has a Preview your booking page button from day one — use it at every step to see what agents will see.
1. Business basics
Settings → General. Add your phone number and business address — they appear on your booking pages and on every invoice Spatiko generates. While you’re here, check the business name, email, currency, measurement units, and timezone that were guessed at signup. The business profile guide covers every field.
2. Brand your business
Settings → Brand Assets. Upload your logo and set a primary color. These carry through everything client-facing: the booking page, order confirmation emails, delivery galleries, and the client portal — so the whole flow feels like your business, not Spatiko’s. Details in branding and legal documents.
3. Add your services
Settings → Services & Forms. Your catalog is the menu clients pick from, and everything downstream — orders, invoices, analytics, payouts — is built from it. Each service uses one of three pricing models:
- Flat rate — one price and duration, e.g. a twilight add-on.
- Priced by property size — tiers by square footage, e.g. a photo package that scales with the home.
- Variations — named options at different prices, e.g. 1-, 2-, or 3-minute video edits.
You can also bundle services into packages at a combined price with a shown saving. Start with your three or four core offerings — you can grow the catalog any time.
4. Set up your booking form
Settings → Services & Forms. Attach services and packages to your Listing Services form so agents can actually book, and add intake questions for whatever you need to know before a shoot — lockbox codes, occupancy, parking notes. How order forms work covers questions, quote requests, and form settings in depth.
If you serve distinct audiences, you can add more forms later — a standard listings menu, a curated luxury set, a rental-media form. Each form chooses which catalog items appear on it; prices always come from the catalog itself, so there’s no per-form pricing to maintain.
5. Coverage & travel
Settings → Team & Availability. Two things live here, and both shape which time slots agents are offered:
- Coverage — set your home base, service area, and travel fees, so properties beyond your included radius are charged automatically and far-away ones can’t be booked at all. See travel time and fees.
- Availability — replace the default weekday hours with your real schedule, and set your booking lead time and buffers between shoots. See setting your availability.
Spatiko combines these with your existing shoots and driving time between properties, so the booking page only ever offers slots you can actually make — the full picture is in calendar and availability.
6. Accept online payments
Settings → Payments. Connect Stripe and clients can pay at booking — cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay — instead of you chasing invoices later. Once connected, you choose when clients pay on each form: upfront at booking, on delivery behind a pay-to-download gate, or on net terms. Setup details: online payments with Stripe.
Online payments are part of Spatiko’s paid plans, so on the free plan this step points you to upgrade — see pricing. You can still run without it: Spatiko generates invoices and receipts in-house either way, and you mark orders paid yourself when money arrives outside the platform.
Take a test booking
Open Preview your booking page and book a shoot as if you were an agent: pick a service, answer your intake questions, choose a slot. Then follow it through on your side — the order appears on your Dashboard and orders board in Planning, the session lands on your calendar, and the confirmation email goes out. When you’re satisfied, cancel the test order; cancelling keeps the record on file but clears its sessions from your calendar.
Once that round trip works, share the booking link with real clients — it’s the same URL you previewed.
Worth doing soon
None of these block your first booking, but each one pays off quickly:
- Sync Google Calendar (Settings → Calendar) so busy times block bookings and shoots appear in your personal calendar — how calendar sync works.
- Import your existing clients (Settings → Data Import) from a CSV of your old system — importing your clients.
- Add your legal documents (Settings → Legal) — terms of service and a cancellation policy. Spatiko doesn’t ship default legal text; until you add your own, the booking page simply doesn’t show any. See legal documents.
- Invite your team if you’re not shooting solo — inviting team members, then send them joining a team on Spatiko.
- Connect a custom domain so booking pages, galleries, and property websites live on your own URL — custom domains.