Appointments

An appointment is anything you put in the diary yourself — a site visit, an estimate, a consultation, a meeting. They sit on the calendar beside everything the product works out for itself, and they are the only entries there you edit directly.

Book an appointment

Three ways to start one, and the last two save you typing:

• New appointment on the calendar.
• Click an empty date in month view, which fills the date in.
• Click an empty slot in week view, which fills in the date and the time.

You need a title and a date, and a start time unless it is all day. An appointment started without a time (from the button or a month’s date) opens as All day, which drops the times entirely. That suits a delivery window or a day on a site. Untick it to give the appointment times. If there is a start and no end, it assumes an hour.

Optionally add a location, notes, the job it is for and the client.

Link it to a job and a client

Pick the job, and if you have not chosen a client yet, the job’s client is filled in. You can change that if the meeting is genuinely with somebody else.

The client picker searches by name, business, email or phone, and has + Add new client in the list, so a call that turns into a site visit does not make you stop and go set up a client first.

An appointment does not have to have either. Something that is just your own time is a valid appointment.

Avoid double-booking yourself

When you save a new appointment, or one whose date or time you changed, the product checks whether anybody on the visit is already booked at that time. If so, it names them: Sam Okafor is already on Fall cleanup — Ashby at 9:00 AM. Two visits at the same time with different people are two crews working, not a clash. A visit with nobody on it yet is checked against the others with nobody on them, which is how a business of one is still warned. An all-day visit counts as overlapping anything else that day for the same people.

The warning is advice, not a refusal. You can save over it — two things genuinely do sometimes overlap, and a scheduler that refuses to believe you is a scheduler people work around.

It checks your own appointments only, not milestones or invoice due dates, because an invoice falling due is not a demand on your time.

Remind your client the day before

An automatic reminder email goes to the client before the appointment. It is Remind clients before a visit, switched on in Automations — or on Tools → Client Reminders, under Works with, which is the same switch. You choose how far ahead on the reminder itself, with Change: anywhere from one to thirty days, one day by default.

The reminder goes at nine in the morning, your time, on the first day the appointment is that close. An appointment booked later in the day that is already that close is reminded within the hour.

One reminder per appointment, never a repeat. It is skipped for a canceled appointment, one with no client on it, and any individual appointment where you have turned the reminder off.

Reminders by email are on every plan. Sending them by text as well is Also by text on the same reminder, which only the owner can choose. It works once your business’s texting is on, under Organization → Texting. Texting is part of SMS notifications and needs Professional, because a text costs per message.

See where a visit has got to

A visit on a job has a status of its own: Scheduled, On the way, On site, Done or Missed. The crew moves it from their phone as the day goes, so each morning of a long job starts fresh at Scheduled, and your client hears On my way for every visit, not just the first. The status shows on the visit and on its card on the Day Board.

You can set it yourself when the crew could not — open the visit, or choose Status on its Day Board card, pick where it has got to, and Set status. Moving it back (Done to On site, say), marking it Missed, or taking it out of Missed asks you why, and the reason stays with the visit. What you set never texts your client: only the crew, setting off, says somebody is coming. Every missed visit, every visit done and every change you make is written to the job’s Schedule history, at the foot of its Visits panel.

A missed visit stays on the record — its people, its time and why. Book again takes you to the job’s Find a time, open in its Visits panel and already looking, so the next visit is a tap away — or, where your business does not use Scheduling & dispatch, to the job’s Add a visit form, already filled with the job, its client, its address and its people. An appointment with no job is just your time, and has no status.

Repeat a visit

A client on every other Tuesday, a pool every Friday, a team meeting every Monday: open the visit and choose Repeat this visit. Say how often — every so many days, weeks or months, or a weekday of the month such as the second Tuesday — and, if you like, only part of the year and when it ends: never, on a date, or after a number of visits. The next visits are listed in words and dates before you save, and Set the repeat keeps it. Tell the client sends them an email with when the visits are and the next few dates.

Each visit after the first is a job of its own, copied from the first: the client, the work, the price lines, how it is billed and taxed, the people, the time and the place. It is booked a set number of days ahead — two weeks unless you change Book each visit — so the crew sees it on their day and your client gets the usual reminder. Until then it is planned: it shows on the calendar outlined, and Book it now on the repeat’s page books it at once. A visit with no job repeats as visits alone.

The repeat’s page lists its coming visits, each linked to its job once it is booked, and Every job this repeat made shows them together on the jobs list. The job says which visit of the repeat it is, and the client’s Work tab lists their repeats. A job of several visits, a project plan or a payment schedule is work in stages and does not repeat; the visit says why in place of the button.

A repeat’s coming visits keep their times: online booking, Find a time and the suggestions never offer anyone else a slot the repeat will need.

A customer can ask for a repeat themselves when they book online, on a service you mark Can repeat. It waits in For you for you to Confirm or Decline, and holds its times until you do — see Let a customer book a repeat.

Change a repeat

On the repeat’s page, a visit that is not booked yet can be moved to another day or time, or skipped, from its ⋯ menu — only that visit changes, and Put it back undoes either. A visit already booked is changed on the visit itself, like any other.

To change every visit from a date — another day, another time, other people, or every two weeks instead of every week — choose Change from a date, or open a booked visit and choose Change this and every visit after it. The next visits are listed in words before you save. Visits already booked after that date are listed too: Move these too moves them to the new plan and calls off the ones it no longer has, and any you moved by hand are left as they are. From a booked visit you can also Take the price and the work from this visit’s job, so every later visit is priced as that one is.

A planned visit that lands on a day your business is closed, or clashes with something booked since, says so on the repeat’s page and in For you — nothing moves it on its own. Stop repeating ends the repeat from a date, and can call off what was already booked from then; your client hears as they would for any visit called off. Every change is in the repeat’s history and the first job’s schedule history.

Your client can stop a repeat too, from their client hub, from one of its coming visits after the first. The visits already booked from then are called off as theirs, you are emailed at once, and the repeat’s page says they stopped it.

Cancel one

Canceling hides an appointment rather than deleting it. Canceled appointments are out of the way by default. Show canceled, in the calendar’s filters, brings them back in every view, grayed out. You can restore one at any time.

Nothing here is ever hard-deleted, so “what happened to that Tuesday visit” always has an answer.

Add it, or put it away

Client Reminders is one of the tools your business chooses: the owner adds it, or removes it, under Tools in the main menu — see Your tools. Appointment reminders, invoice reminders before and after the due date, and the review request after a completed job go out only while it is on, and each is switched on in Automations: Client Reminders needs Automations, so adding it adds Automations too, after one confirmation. Removing it deletes nothing you have recorded; add it back and everything is where you left it, its settings included.