Edit your confirmation email and set up reminders

All automated emails to your customers are edited in one place: Settings in the left menu, then the Email Settings tab.

They are only there. Locations do not have an email tab — none of a location's tabs (Location settings, Book button, Customer flow, Booking experience, Open dates, Website) contain email text. You still get location-specific emails, but you do it by choosing locations on the email itself — covered further down.

The two lists

Default emails — described in the admin as "Standardized messages that are partially pre-created by Rentalbuddy". This is where your booking confirmation lives. You can edit their content, but you cannot delete them, duplicate them or switch them off; the actions column is empty for these rows.

Your emails — "Create your own automated messages that are sent based on different events in the system." Reminders, thank-you emails and anything else you invent. These have the full set of actions and an Active switch.

Each row shows Subject, Trigger, Location and, for your own emails, Active.

Editing the confirmation email

This is the most-asked question in support, and the path is short.

Settings → Email Settings.
In Default emails, find the row whose Trigger says When the booking is created.
Click the row (on a phone, press Email content). It expands into an editor on the left and a live Email preview on the right.
Edit and press Save.

Inside the editor you have:

Email subject — one field per language, with a language selector above it and a + Variable dropdown next to it that inserts placeholders.

Logo — an on/off switch. The image itself is the Logo (Image URL) you uploaded under Settings → Account — despite the label, that is a drag-and-drop image uploader, not a URL field. Use PNG or JPEG: an SVG is accepted but shows as a broken image in most email programs, and with no logo at all, emails show a generic grey placeholder.

Messages — two editable text blocks, each with its own on/off switch:

Introduction text — the paragraph at the top. This is the one operators usually mean by "the confirmation text".
Closing text — the paragraph at the bottom.

Buttons — each has a label field you can rewrite per language, plus an on/off switch: Before booking, Start booking, End booking, Pay, Prolong booking and Move start time.

Prolong booking and Move start time follow the location's own customer setting, not the switch here: if the location has the feature off, the button never appears in that location's emails; if the location has it on, the button appears even when you switch the block off here. Prolong booking is also left out of emails for bookings that contain an event.

Toggles with no text of their own — turn these blocks on or off, but there is nothing to write: Customer details, Order ID, Booking details, Directions – Location, Contact details – Location (and Membership details on membership emails).

If your account uses more than one customer language, a translate toolbar appears at the top of the editor and can fill the other languages from your main language.

What emails cannot do: attachments, terms, house rules

Emails are built only from the blocks above. There is no way to attach a file — no PDF of your terms, no house-rules document — and no block that inserts your Terms & Conditions text. The T&C your customers accept at checkout is a checkout feature and never appears in emails.

If you want house rules or usage instructions to reach customers:

Put the text (or a link to a page on your website) in Introduction text or Closing text — on the confirmation, or on a reminder timed before the booking starts.
To make customers actively accept rules before unlocking, use the Before Unlock step of Customer flow instead — see Pickup, return and booking statuses. That step can require acceptance of terms or rules, which is stronger than an email nobody reads.

The available email types and what triggers them

Email	Trigger shown in the list	When it actually happens
Booking confirmation	When the booking is created	Sent immediately when the booking is completed
Payment email	When an invoice is created	Sent when a payment link is created for a booking
Membership confirmation	When a membership is purchased	Sent immediately when a membership is bought
Your own booking emails	see below	Scheduled relative to the booking
Your own membership emails	Before membership expiry / After membership expiry	Counted from the membership's end date

When you create your own booking email, When should the email be sent? offers five choices:

When booking confirmation is sent — goes out together with the confirmation, with no delay.
Before booking start
Before booking end
After booking start
After booking end

For the four timed ones you then set How long before or after? with Amount and Time unit (Hours, Minutes, Days).

The timing is calculated in the location's timezone from the booking's start or end. If the calculated moment is already in the past when the booking is made, that email is simply never scheduled — silently. A "2 hours before start" reminder does nothing for a booking made 90 minutes before start; no error is shown anywhere, and the booking's message list will have no row for it. This is by design, not a fault.

Reminders are attached to a booking at the moment it is created, and a booking that never completed payment gets none. One more subtlety: when you create a new reminder, it is applied to existing bookings whose start time is still in the future at that moment — so a new "before booking end" reminder does not attach itself to rentals that are already running.

Creating a reminder

Settings → Email Settings.
In Your emails, press Create email.
Fill in Email subject (per language).
Pick When should the email be sent? and, if needed, Amount and Time unit.
Leave All locations on, or switch it off and pick Locations.
Set Booking status. Do not skip this. See the warning below.
Set Booking type — Product booking, Event booking, or both.
Leave Active on.
Save.
Reopen the new row from the list and write the actual content — the create dialog only sets the rules, not the text.

The setting that stops reminders from ever sending

This is the single most common cause of "I set up a reminder and it never went out".

Booking status is a positive filter. The email is only sent if the booking's status at the moment of sending is one you selected.

If you leave Booking status empty, the reminder will never be sent for product bookings. Empty does not mean "any status" here. This is the opposite of the Locations field, where leaving it empty does mean all locations.

The choices are:

Ready for pickup — the booking exists and the customer has not collected yet. This is the normal status of a future booking.
Not collected - pre-flow required — the same, at a location that requires the customer to complete a step before collecting.
Picked up — the customer has collected.
Returned — the rental is finished.

Match the status to the moment:

A reminder before booking start must include Ready for pickup (and Not collected - pre-flow required if that location uses a before-booking step). If you only tick Picked up, it can never fire — the customer has not picked up yet.
A reminder before booking end usually wants Picked up.
A thank-you after booking end usually wants Returned, and sometimes Picked up too if your customers do not always complete the return step.

Booking type works the same way: it is a positive filter, so an email with no type selected matches nothing. Bookings that contain an event count as Event booking; everything else is a Product booking. (The create dialog pre-selects Product booking but leaves Booking status empty — which is exactly why the warning above matters.)

One exception to the Booking status filter: emails triggered by When booking confirmation is sent skip it entirely — they go out with the confirmation regardless of pickup status.

Two more things that stop an email:

The Active switch. Its tooltip says it plainly: "If Active is turned off this email will not be sent out to customers."
The Locations selection, if the booking's location is not in it.

Variables you can use

Insert them with the + Variable dropdown, in the subject or in Introduction text / Closing text / button labels. All of them are filled in when the email is sent:

[Company name], [Site name], [Site phone], [order id], [First name], [Customer name], [Customer surname], [Customer email], [Customer phone], [Customer Adress], [Booking Date], [Booking start time], [Booking end time], [Custom checkout fields].

Notes worth knowing:

[First name] and [Customer name] both give the first name only. Use [Customer name] together with [Customer surname] for a full name.
[Custom checkout fields] inserts the answers the customer gave to your own checkout questions.
Variables are only filled in inside the message texts and button labels. Typing one into a block that has no text of its own does nothing.

Directions and contact details per location

There are two blocks for this, and neither one has text you write in email settings:

Directions – Location is a button. Only its label is editable here; the link itself is a map link built from the location's coordinates, or from its address and city if no coordinates are set.
Contact details – Location has no editable text at all. It prints the location's address, phone and email.

So the way to change what a customer sees under these blocks is to open Locations, click the location, and edit the Location & Contact Details card on the Location settings tab: Location Email, Location Phone, and the address. If a location has no phone or email saved, the email shows a placeholder instead of blank — a good sign that the location record is incomplete.

Colours in the email also follow the location's theme colour.

Different email text per location

The templates themselves belong to the account. The Locations setting on an email does not change its wording — it only decides which locations that email applies to.

To give one location different wording:

Open Settings → Email Settings.
On the email you want to vary, use the duplicate action to copy it (available on Your emails).
Open the copy's settings, switch All locations off and select only the special location.
Open the original, switch All locations off and select all the other locations.
Edit the copy's text, and switch it Active.

Do not leave both covering the same location, or that location gets both emails.

The booking confirmation is a special case: it is a Default email and cannot be duplicated. For a confirmation, the per-location parts are the automatic ones — directions, contact details and colours — which already differ by location.

The sender

You cannot set a sender address. Emails go out from a fixed Rentalbuddy address (noreply@rentalbuddy.io), which also means replies to that address do not reach you. Give customers a real address to reply to by switching on Contact details – Location and filling in Location Email on the location.

The sender name shown in the inbox is not something you can edit in the admin either. If yours does not show your company name, that is not a setting you have missed — ask support.

The preview

The right-hand side of the editor is a live Email preview that updates as you type, before you save. It has a language selector, and two width buttons, Desktop width and Mobile width. On a phone the preview appears below the editor.

The preview uses example data — an example company, customer and booking — so the variables show sample values rather than a real booking.

Who gets a copy

Only the booking confirmation is copied to your own team — and the copies are on by default. The switch (Send booking confirmation email copies to Account Contact E-mail.) starts enabled. The addresses live under Settings → Account → Account Contact E-mail, a required field; add more with Add contact email. So a copy of every confirmation lands in your inbox unless you turn the switch off.

Each address gets its own copy, with Copy: in front of the subject. Reminders, payment emails and membership emails are never copied to you.

To stop the flood, turn that switch off or remove addresses. There is no per-location notification address.

Quick answers

"My reminder never went out." Open its settings and look at Booking status first. Empty means never. Then check Active, Booking type and Locations. Then open the affected booking's message list. No row at all for the reminder means it was never scheduled — usually because the booking was created after the reminder's send moment had already passed. A Failed row means a rule stopped it at sending time — wrong booking status, a cancelled booking, or the email switched off. The row shows when it failed (hover the status chip for the history), but not which rule, so check the email's filters against that booking yourself.

"My logo shows broken in emails." Check the format first — SVG does not work in most email programs; upload a PNG or JPEG instead. Logos uploaded before mid-2026 were also affected by a storage bug that has since been fixed; if yours still shows broken, upload it again to replace the old link.

"Where do I edit the confirmation text?" Settings → Email Settings → the row with the trigger When the booking is created → expand it → Introduction text.

"I edited a reminder — do existing bookings get the new timing?" Yes. Changing a reminder rebuilds the pending sends for bookings that have not received it yet. Editing a booking's times also moves its pending reminders.

"Can I send an SMS instead?" No. Emails are the only channel.

"Can I get a printable receipt?" The booking confirmation is your booking document. A card payment receipt is a separate document produced by Stripe — see Rentalbuddy or Stripe — where do I go for what?.

"How do I check whether a specific customer's email was actually sent?" Open the booking; it has a list of the messages sent for that booking with their delivery status, and a resend action. If it never arrived at all, work through The customer says no confirmation email arrived.