Managing appointments and customers
Use the Supervise section of your appointment schedule to manage your schedule on a daily basis. This is where you can review your bookings and approve or reject them. You can also gain insight into how users interact with your schedule by using the daily, weekly or monthly usage reports.
You can access all your users’ details or make appointments on their behalf via User Management. If you selected a different term for your users, such as “clients”, this section will then be named Client Management.
On your dashboard, you will also find Import and Export. These features enable you to import and export user data in various formats to and from your appointment schedule.
Reviewing your bookings
Via Supervise > Overview, you can review all your upcoming appointments. You can access an overview of old and deleted bookings via the Show history and Show trash links respectively. The overview can be sorted by clicking the column headers. If your schedule has multiple resources or services, a drop-down menu is available to filter out appointments for a certain resource or service.
Using the search bar below the overview, you can find the reservations for a particular person in your appointment schedule. Another way to get an overview of someone’s appointments (across multiple schedules) is via User Management.
The information shown in the overview is configurable via Configure > Layout. Here you can select any of the required and optional booking detail fields, including custom fields, to be shown as columns in list views such as this overview.
To the right of each entry, you will see two or more icons. Clicking the schedule icon will show you the appointment/slot on the schedule, while the edit icon allows you to make changes to the appointment/slot (see below). In a capacity appointment schedule, the spyglass icon allows you to zoom in on the reservations for a particular slot.
For appointment schedules with payment or approval configurations, the system also shows a column with symbols such as status codes.
or . You can hover over the symbol to see a pop-up with an explanation of the symbol, and you can also view the list of all theApproving reservations manually
If you work with administrator approval, you will also see a Configuring the booking process).
in the booking overview for pending bookings or a for bookings that have already been approved; if paid with credits. An overview of all pending bookings can be found by clicking ‘show pending’ in the control menu. This option will become visible when approval is required. On the appointment schedule view, bookings that still need to be approved will be shown in a lighter shading. The administrator can also choose to receive an email for each approval request (seeTo approve a booking, click on the edit icon for that particular appointment. In the pop-up that appears, you will see the booking’s status in blue and the option to
it. If the booking has already been approved, you will see the option to , which allows you to revoke your approval, if necessary.Note that superusers also have access to the booking overview. By default, superusers are able to approve bookings in your appointment schedule. This can be changed, if necessary, via Configure > Access, by unchecking (see also Superusers’ access rights)
Making appointments on someone’s behalf
If you receive a booking by phone or email, you may want to add it to the calendar yourself. But given that you are logged in as administrator, the booking will show as belonging to the administrator. To avoid this, you may want to ‘act on behalf’ of someone.
To do this, go to User Management. You can only act on behalf of registered users and will need to create a new user if that person is not already registered.
Next click the blue arrow to the right of the user’s details. This will take you to your dashboard, where you can select the schedule you want to use for the booking. In the top bar, next to your own username, you will see the username/email address of the person on whose behalf you are acting.
If you now make a booking, it will be listed with their name followed by a slash and the name of the administrator or superuser who created the booking. This ensures that the booking gets listed in the user’s agenda and automatic confirmation and reminder emails are sent to them, if these have been configured.
While you are acting as someone else, you retain your own privileges. So, even if you restricted the information regular users can see, you will still see it when you are acting on behalf of a user.
To stop acting on someone’s behalf, simply click on the username in the top-right corner of the screen.
Keep in mind that if your appointment schedule does not require users to register, you won’t be able to act on their behalf. However, you can still create appointments as administrator and then send confirmation emails to unregistered users. To do so, make sure that Access Control settings, and enable the email field via Configure > Process. This will allow you to enter an email address for each booking you create as administrator. If you have configured email confirmations, a confirmation will be sent automatically.
is unchecked in theReporting
You can access several standard reports via Supervise > Reporting. Using the various selectors, you can gain insight in overall booking behavior and/or utilization per day, week or month over a specific time period. The data that is used to generate the chart/report can be downloaded in CSV or XLS format by clicking .
Note that if all you want is the raw booking data for a specific time period, you should use the download option under Supervise > Download instead. This data can be used to generate your own custom reports in Excel, Numbers or Google Docs for your online appointment scheduler.
User management
Customer or user details can be accessed via User Management. When you work with the credit system, you can use the edit option to manipulate individual users’ credit. In the same way you can change a user’s role from regular user to superuser or block them from accessing your reservation system altogether.
The Export feature can be found in the menu on the right-hand side of your dashboard. You can use this to download all users’ registration details in either CSV, XLS, XML or VCF/vCard format. If you need to make mass changes to the data, you can export the customer database to the CSV format. You can then apply the changes, save it as a comma-separated CSV file and upload that file to your appointment schedule via Import. Please note that Import can only process comma-separated (CSV) files.
Troubleshooting
If, during file import, you see an error like “Malformed CSV: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8”, check the following:
- Please make sure that you have saved the file in CSV format.
- Sometimes letters with diacritic marks such as “é” cause errors. These marks can be manually removed, but it is generally quicker to copy the file to Google Docs and to upload it from there.
- Please make sure that the file is comma-separated. Older versions of Excel sometimes save the file using a semicolon-separated format. The Google Docs fix mentioned above would also solve this problem.