Appointments
If you couldn't tell by the name, appointments are what checkAppointments is all about. In this section of our documentation, we're getting into the nitty gritty of all things appointments. On this particular page we're going to go through:
On the sub pages of the appointments documentation section, we'll be going through:
All the ways appointments can be added to your schedule
How to view the appointments you have coming up as well as the details around those appointments
The actions you can take on any given appointment (like rescheduling, cancelling, invoicing, etc.)
If you still have questions about how appointments work inside checkAppointments after reading through these pages, feel free to contact our support team or sign up for a general support call with one of our staff members and we can work through all of your questions individually.
An appointment in checkAppointments represents an individual booking made with a client for a particular reason. The reason may either be a service appointment (which is a 1-on-1 booking between a staff person and a client) or it may be a class (which is a group based appointment where multiple clients can register for a time slot).
Once an appointment is added to your schedule, it blocks off your availability so that a client cannot book with you during that time for any other reason. This keeps you from having double bookings.
Each appointment on your schedule is set to a certain duration that's determined by the service or class that the appointment is set for. For instance, if the service that the client booked is set to a duration of 1 hour, then an hour will be blocked off of your schedule. You can adjust the duration of an appointment after it is set by editing the appointment, but by default the appointment time is set by the duration of the service or class.
You'll be able to view appointments by going to either your Main → My Calendar view or your List views. Once you click into an appointment, you'll be able to see more details around the appointment and take certain actions. The appointment detail screen, shown below, tells you the location, staff, reason, date, time, & client that you'll be meeting with:
The appointment detail screen also allows you to take different actions around the appointment. We go through all of the things you can do with appointments on other pages of this documentation. Here is a quick list of helpful links:
What's included on the appointment detail page
Changing an appointment's status
For now, we hope this section has given you a better idea as to what appointments are. If you have any questions, as always, feel free to contact our support team or sign up for a general support call with one of our staff members and we can work through all of your questions individually.
checkAppointments is built to make appointment management a smooth, flowing process. To do this, we make use of Appointment Statuses.
The status describes where in the entire appointment process (from time of booking to successfully serviced) a client is. There are 5 statuses that an appointment can possibly be listed as that we discuss in this documentation:
All of these status can be viewed in separate lists from one another for easy navigating and sorting. Keeping up with appointment statuses gives you a better idea of who you met with on a certain day, which is good for an old memory jog sometimes and for pulling reports from the app.
Open Status Appointments
Open status is what every appointment is listed as initially. As soon as you add an appointment or the client schedules him/herself, the appointment is added to your schedule and in Open status.
Appointments that are listed in Open status can be found in the Open appointments list under Lists → Open Appointments. You can change the status of an Open appointment to Checked In, Completed, No Show, or Cancelled.
When appointments are first opened, clients will receive a New Appointment email and the staff will receive a New Appointment notification. If appointments are re-opened (after being marked as any other status) then clients will receive the Appointment Edited/Changed email.
You'll also know if an appointment is in open status because the status will display on the Appointment Detail page:
Checked In Appointments
As clients come in for their appointment, you can mark their appointment as Checked In. Only appointments that are currently in Open Status can be marked as checked in. From Checked In status, you can mark the appointment as "Completed" to check the client out.
To provide a little more color on this one, Checked In is sort of a half way status. It is still technically an Open appointment and thus it's not a status that stands on it's own. You can see whether an open appointment is checked in since on the appointment detail screen, the status will be open and the Checkin button will be disabled: