Global Appointment Settings
Settings > Appointment Settings
The settings we manage here will have an impact on how the user can interact with the appointments menu when they log in to their studios.
The appointment feature is very similar to a user making a booking or a reservation for a class or a session on any available date and time in the near future. The user journeys for making appointments are covered in the appointment workflow article.
Note: This feature has dependencies to Services and Instructors. The services that a studio offers will need to set up using the services menu during onboarding a studio. Likewise the instructors will also need to be added correctly into the system.
Preparation time between appointments.
This field can take in value in minutes that will help an instructor to have some preparation time between two consecutive appointments. For example, when we set a global value of 60 in this field, appointments can be scheduled with 60 minute gaps between one another. This means that after an appointment finishes, there is a time of 60 minutes for the instructor to prepare (clean, reset etc) for the next appointment.
How many hours / minutes before the appointment you want to prevent members from making a booking?
The value we set here will act as the minimum notice time for an instructor. For example: If there is an appointment slot available at 9 AM on a Sunday, and there is a value of 1 hour and 30 minutes that is set in this field, then the latest time a customer can book a session will be 7:30 AM. After 7:30, the session will not be available to book.
How many hours / minutes before the appointment you want to prevent members from making a cancellation?
The value we set here will act as the minimum notice time for cancellations for an instructor. For example: If there is an appointment slot available at 9 AM on a Sunday, and there is a value of 2 hours and 0 minutes that is set in this field, then the latest time a customer can cancel a session will be 7:00 AM. After 7:00 AM the session will not be available to cancel.
How many days into the future can the customer make an appointment?
The value we set here will affect how the calendar is shown to the customer for them to book sessions in advance. If a value of 30 days is set in this field, then the customer can book an advance session for only up to 30 calendar days in advance. The value is the preference of the business owner in alignment with the instructors.
Confirming or Cancelling appointment bookings
The toggle switch (on/off slider in the picture above) has an important implication on who can cancel or confirm an appointment.
When a customer makes an appointment, an email is sent out to the customer, the studio and the instructor who was chosen.
In most cases, the studio either confirms or cancels the appointment in their portal. Using this option in the Appointment Global Settings, we can provide the flexibility for either the studio or the instructors themselves to confirm/cancel the appointments.
The instructor can cancel or confirm the booking by clicking on the link from the email they receive or by navigating to Dashboard > For the next 7 days > Appointments > Confirm/Cancel.
Note: if the switch is in the OFF state, then, only the Studio admin can confirm or cancel appointments.
Once, the appointment is confirmed, the customer gets a confirmation message in their email.