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- The difference between My Calendar versus Staff Schedule
- How to use My Calendar
- How to use Staff Schedule
If you still have questions about either calendar views after reading through this documentation, please feel free to reach out to our support team and we'd be happy to answer them. Alternatively, you can always book a time for a general support call and we can walk through your questions on a 1-on-1 phone call.
Once you login to the online appointment scheduling application provided by checkAppointments, you’ll notice that there are 2 types of calendars provided in the Main drop down: My Calendar and Staff Schedule. One of the common questions we get asked is when to use which one.
The sections below go through some of the main difference between
Names versus No Names
The main difference you’ll notice is that the My Calendar view has the names of the clients you’re seeing in the calendar display whereas the Staff Schedule view only has the time blocked off. This means that if you have a lot of appointments that are short in length (15 minutes or less) the My Calendar view will look really cluttered as it is trying to fit the name of the client in the display which makes it look like it is taking up at least 30 minutes worth of time. The Staff Schedule view, on the other hand, does a nice job of displaying shorter appointments and if you hover over the booking you can see the name of the client.
I have set up a dummy online appointment scheduling meeting in both the My Calendar and Staff Schedule views to show you the difference. Here is what a 15 minute appointment would look like in the My Calendar view:
And here is what the same 15 minute appointment looks like in the Staff Schedule view:
Multiple Schedules
As you may have guessed, the staff schedule is the first place you want to go in our online scheduling application if you’re looking to see all the staff member’s schedules in one view, but the My Calendar can be customized to see an additional 4 calendars alongside yours.
The Staff Schedule display of multiple staff member’s calendars has them all in the same calendar with different columns for each staff and each location the staff works out of:
In the My Calendar display, you’ll first select the additional calendars from the “Show additional calendars” dropdown. The My Calendar display puts up to 5 calendars in a grid format on one screen in the order you’ve chosen to display them:
In a situation where you have a client call in and is looking for an appointment with any available staff person on Thursday, August 22, 2013 it would likely be best to use the Staff Schedule view. That way you can click on the view for 1 day and see everyone’s availability in white and will know quickly what times you can offer the client:
Viewing Multiple Locations
In online appointment scheduling software, it can be tricky to decide how best to display a person’s schedule who operates out of more than one location. The location could be a physical office, a virtual meeting place (like Skype, GoToMeeting, or a webinar), a mobile unit, or the client’s home. If you are trying to look at your schedule based on the days of the week you’re going to be at a given location, I’d recommend using the Staff Schedule display.
As you can see in the screenshot below, you can tell from the columns under each day when you’re scheduled for two locations and what location you will be at on any given day of the week. Make sure to select the 7d radio dial button to view a full week’s calendar.
Options, options, options
As you can tell, much of the reason why you’d choose to view the My Calendar or Staff Schedule display is going to come down to personal preference. Maybe you like viewing it by the Month which is only available in the My Calendar display or maybe you like to see it in 5 day periods which is only available in the Staff Schedule. With online appointment scheduling, every user is going to want something different, but through this documentation and by playing around with it on your own, you’ll start to figure out when it’s best to use Staff Schedule and when it’s best to use My Calendar.
Your Main → My Calendar view is great for seeing your upcoming appointments in the next day, three days, week or month. All appointments that are in either Open, Completed, or No Show status will show on your My Calendar view. Any Cancelled appointments will remove themselves from your My Calendar screen since they are no longer on your schedule taking up any time.
When looking at your My Calendar view, you can:
- Schedule new appointments
- Click into appointments to view more details about them
- Reschedule appointments with drag and drop
- Cancel appointments by selecting them and clicking delete
- Click into a scheduled class session and view all attendees for that class
We'll go through how to do each of these actions in this section of our documentation. Click on the links above to jump to the specific areas on our documentation page where we cover those topics.
You can also use your Main → My Calendar view to add bookings to your schedule for service based appointments. This is nice to use when you:
- Know the exact date and time that you want to have the appointment on and don't need to view your availability (which the service appt book one time option lets you do) - or -
- You want to add an appointment to your schedule outside of the times that you have hours of availability set up for
To do this, just go to either Main → My Calendar and navigate to the date that you want to add an appointment for. In this example, I'm going to be adding an appointment for 7:00pm on Wednesday, March 25th, 2015 which is outside of my set working hours. From the My Calendar screen, I'll navigate to March 25th and double click at the 7:00pm time slot:
This will take you into the set up appointment screen where you can select the location, staff & service you want to have for the appointment:
Once you've set the location, staff, & service, you can enter in which client the appointment is being set for. If the client is already on your account he/she will appear in the type ahead drop down. You can select them from the type ahead drop down by click on their name with your mouse or by hitting the "tab" key on your keyboard:
If the client is not already on your account, then you can type in their name on the client field and you'll be prompted to create the client record when you are saving the appointment. In this example, I'm going to pretend like we are setting up this appointment for a new client by the name of Casey Jones. I'll enter the clients name, make sure that the appointment time and the staff reservation time are all correct, double check that the reminders I want to send are properly selected, then hit the "Save" button:
Since Casey Jones is a new client, before the appointment is saved, I'll be prompted that I have to add the client record to my account:
I'll select "OK" and then fill out the short form to add the client to my account:
Now that the client is added, I can click "Save" on the appointment to commit the booking to my schedule:
That will prompt me with whether or not I want to send out emails to the client and/or staff about the new booking. I can select who I want to send emails to and click Confirm:
If I selected to send an email to the client, then once I hit confirm, I'll have a chance to edit the email before it gets sent out:
After sending the email, I'll be back on the Main → My Calendar screen where I can see the appointment I just added:
At this point in time, you can only add service based appointments through your My Calendar screen. In order to add a client to a class session, you will need to use the Main → Book One Time Appointment flow.
When on Main → My Calendar, you can hover over an appointment and double click on it to enter into its appointment detail screen. To do this, just navigate to Main → My Calendar and find the appointment you want to see further details about:
Double click on that appointment and you will enter into the appointment detail screen for that appointment:
From here you can perform a number of appointment actions such as:
- Rescheduling the appointment
- Editing the appointment
- Cancelling Canceling the appointment
- Checking the appointment in
- Marking the appointment as Completed or No Show
- Creating an invoice for the appointment
- Resending the appointment confirmation email
- Printing an appointment slip
You can also see some details around the appointment like:
- Tracking any changes that have been made
- Viewing emails that have gone out
- Seeing any payments that have been made
The My Calendar view is drag and drop enabled to allow for really easy rescheduling for the same staff. If the client is rescheduling an appointment with the same staff at the same location but just for a different day or time, you can drag the appointment to the new date and time by clicking on the appointment's title bar and moving it over to the new date and time.
To do this, first navigate to your Main → My Calendar view and find the appointment you want to reschedule:
Hover over the bar that contains your client's name and you'll see your cursor switch to the cross hairs symbol. Now drag the appointment to the new date and time:
After moving it to the new date and time, the app will ask you if you are sure you want to make this change:
You'll then have an opportunity to select whether you want to send an email out about the rescheduled appointment. Check off who you want to send an email to and click Confirm:
If you selected to send an email out to your client, this will bring up an email editor for you to edit the body of the email before it is delivered:
That's a lot of discussion on the functionality for one calendar, so if you have any questions or feel like we missed something here, go ahead and contact our support team to let us know. Or if you are looking for more hands on support, you can always schedule a 1-on-1 support call with our staff and we'll get on a screenshare together to walk through your questions.
You can also cancel appointments from the My Calendar view. To do this, simply select the appointment and click the "Delete" button on your keyboard:
Once you click delete, you'll be prompted with whether or not you want you are sure you wish to cancel the appointment:
If you select okay, you'll also get a confirmation message to let you know that the appointment was indeed cancelled. The cancellation email will then send out to the staff that was assigned to the appointment as well as to the client that the appointment was with.
You will see individual class sessions appear on the My Calendar for the staff person that's assigned as the leader of the class. When you see it on your My Calendar, you will see a summary of how many seats are available and how many seats are taken:
If you double click on the scheduled class session from your My Calendar view, you will enter into the full attendees list for that class:
Each attendee for the class has a unique appointment associated with them. You can click on the clients' names from the class attendees list to enter into the individual appointment screen for each client.
That's a lot of discussion on the functionality for one calendar, so if you have any questions or feel like we missed something here, go ahead and contact our support team to let us know. Or if you are looking for more hands on support, you can always schedule a 1-on-1 support call with our staff and we'll get on a screenshare together to walk through your questions.
Your staff schedule view is great for contrasting your staff's availability against the appointments that have already been added to their schedule. When looking at your staff schedule, you'll see that any time slots where a staff person does not have working hours set up displays in grey, any time slots where the staff person does have working hours set up display in white, and any appointments that are already on the staff's calendar display in the color that the service/class that was booked is set to.
The staff schedule is broken up as a grid so when you are looking at the white areas that are displaying, you can look at the top of the grid to see which staff is available and which location they're available at on that day.
Double clicking on any of the colored areas will take you into the appointment detail page for that specific appointment. You can hover over any of the colored areas on the staff schedule to see which client the appointment is going to be with:
You can also narrow down so that you are only looking at one location instead of all locations:
You can do the same thing for the staff:
The best way to use staff schedule is to get a glimpse of how booked up each of your staff are over a given time period. This is nice if you have a client who calls in and wants to know your general availability. You can take a quick glance at the staff schedule and tell the client any of the areas that are showing in white are available.
Please feel free to contact our support team if you have any questions about using the staff schedule. If you'd prefer to speak with one of our support staff on the phone, you can always book a time for a 1-on-1 support call as well.