The two calendars you can access on checkAppointments are either the My Calendar or Staff Schedule views. Both of these calendars can be used to navigate into appointments, but they both provide different benefits as far as seeing your schedule and availability. In this documentation, we'll go through:
- 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.
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.