Rosha counselling clinic: from online booking to counsellor settlement, on custom WordPress

A centre with three booking channels — by phone, in person and online — several payment methods, and four groups of users with entirely different views (manager, receptionist, counsellor, client) cannot be run on off-the-shelf WordPress plugins.

The problems were specific. Double booking: when the receptionist gives away a slot on the phone while a client is taking the same slot online, the system has to refuse one — not record both and leave the problem to the appointment itself. Counsellor share: each counsellor and each service can carry a different percentage or fixed amount, and working that out by hand at month end is both slow and a source of disputes. Per-role visibility: a counsellor must not see another counsellor's data, and that has to be enforced in the query, not merely in the menu that is displayed.

And a harder constraint: the clinic's working calendar is Jalali, but no booking plugin treats the Jalali calendar as a first-class citizen.

Instead of patching plugins together, a bespoke booking and management engine was written: three custom plugins and a hand-written theme, on WordPress's own REST API with nonce authentication and capability-based access control — not scattered Ajax and no intermediary plugin.

Booking and capacity. A live Jalali calendar that reads capacity from a single endpoint, with an atomic database-level lock when an appointment is taken; simultaneous double booking was eliminated outright. A waiting list that notifies automatically when a slot frees up, and one-click session extension for when an appointment runs long.

Payments. A multi-gateway architecture on a shared interface — a live gateway plus an internal test gateway so flows can be exercised without real money — with deposits or payment in full, globally or per service, and refunds that record themselves in the financial report.

The reception desk. The receptionist's live operations console is built from 15 independent modules, each of which can be switched off, moved and resized. An automatic shift without a cash register, an action-oriented command line, the waiting queue, and weekly, monthly and yearly statistics. Every appointment status change passes through a server-side transition matrix, so an invalid transition is always refused.

The counsellor panel. A counsellor lands straight in their own panel: today's and this month's figures, the weekly calendar, session notes, leave requests, and transparent earnings from a three-level share formula — global, then service, then counsellor; fixed or percentage. Data isolation is checked at every endpoint.

Financial reporting. Several views with advanced filters and an Excel export, plus proper Persian PDFs through mPDF: full right-to-left, the Vazirmatn typeface, a digital signature and a QR verification code on every receipt and settlement statement. Net income is always collected minus refunded, so no transaction escapes the report.

Client accounts and SMS. Anyone who books — in person or online — automatically gets an account and signs in with their mobile number next time; the "your details" step disappeared from the booking form. SMS automation with a send queue, retries and delivery tracking covers 27 events, from booking confirmation and appointment reminders to the one-time login code, each independently switchable with editable text.