Recipes · R3

Appointment reminders from a booking system or spreadsheet

Your own scheduled job reads tomorrow's bookings and sends each customer a reminder template.

Goal: Fewer no-shows, with reminders that never go out twice.

What starts it

Your scheduled job

Your cron job, every morning — one run per booking row.

Your values

phone

The customer's phone from the booking.

name

The customer's name.

booking_id

Your booking id.

day

The appointment day.

time

The appointment time.

Test mode (dry run): every step runs on your account, but nothing changes and nothing is sent.

Step 1
Find your reminder template
GETList WhatsApp templates
Do this once per run, not per row.
```
curl -X GET 'https://mcp.wa-api.cloud/v1/templates?status=APPROVED&search=reminder' \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY"
```
Passes on: template_id (from data.0.id)

Step 2

Make sure the customer is a contact

POSTCreate or update a contact

curl -X POST 'https://mcp.wa-api.cloud/v1/contacts' \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Idempotency-Key: booking-bk-5521-contact' \
  -d '{
  "phone": "+15555550125",
  "name": "Omar Test"
}'

Passes on: contact_id (from id)

Step 3

Send the reminder

POSTSend a WhatsApp template

The idempotency key is the booking id plus the day, so re-running the job the same day sends nothing new.

curl -X POST 'https://mcp.wa-api.cloud/v1/messages/template' \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Idempotency-Key: booking-bk-5521-2026-09-25' \
  -d '{
  "contact_id": "{{steps.contact.contact_id}}",
  "template_id": "{{steps.templates.template_id}}",
  "body_variables": [
    "Omar Test",
    "2026-09-25",
    "10:30"
  ]
}'

Good to know

Send caps apply; spread large batches over the morning.