Skip to content

Calendar and Appointments

← Calendar & Appointments

What it Does

  • Make Appointment bookings
  • Allow customers to create a booking from your website
  • Block out specific hours
  • Create appointments that will:
    • Show in the Calendar tab
    • Sync to your Google and Office 365 Calendars
    • Send appointment confirmation emails to customer/contacts

What it Doesn't Do

  • Make the bookings for you

Table of Contents

Booking Appointments

We first recommend checking out the Business Hours feature. It's off by default, but allows you to set hours of operation, and add holidays you will be closed or unavailable for. Configuring this will automatically update any customer facing calendars for when you are closed. Super handy!

You can make a new appointment in a variety of ways.

  • At the top of a Customer Detail page, click New > Appointment. Or on the same screen farther down, to the right of the Appointments section, you can click New, which does the same thing.

     
  • Go to the Calendar tab (may need to click More > Calendar).
  • At the top of a Ticket, click New > Appointment. Or on the same screen farther down, to the right of the Appointments section, you can click New, which does the same thing.

     
  • At the top of the app, to the right of the Search all the things field, click + > New Appointment.

 

Once there, you can click the Toggle View (calendar) button in the top right to change the view to a horizontal view that doesn't have the appointment sidebar, and gives you options to only view appointments assigned to a specific User Account. If you switch to this view, in the upper right, click New Appointment.

Once you use one of these methods to create an appointment, it will either display a form similar to below, or you will fill out the form on the right side when on the Calendar in its default single calendar view. All fields marked with an * are required fields.

Select a ticket to schedule or re-schedule: Select an open ticket from the drop-down to assign this appointment to the chosen ticket.

  • Note: If you do not select one, you cannot attach the appointment to a ticket later.
  • This dropdown will not appear when you create an appointment from a customer profile, or a ticket (since it will be attached to the ticket you are viewing)

Customer name: Start to type and then select a customer's name. If you picked a ticket from the prior dropdown, it will disable this field since the ticket will have a customer attached. This field will not appear on the form to the right of the Calendar, nor when creating an appointment on a ticket or customer profile (since the customer is already known).

Subject/Summary: Give the appointment a title. This will be displayed on the calendar itself and sent to your technicians if they have a Notification Set that emails them when an appointment is created (more on this later).

Description: Any appointment details you want to preserve. When you create an appointment while on a specific ticket, it will auto populate this field with the ticket number and ticket title, but feel free to edit it.

Appointment type: Select the type of appointment this will be from this drop-down menu. This sets the type of appointment and drives which email is sent out to your customers, and auto-fills the Location field. Read more about defining appointment types.

Appointment Reminders Schedule: Lets you select from predefined appointment reminders so that you don't forget about the appointment.

Location: Fill in the location for the appointment and it will set the location for the appointment and populate the {{appointment_location}} tag in your appointment email templates.

All Day: Turn this on to indicate the appointment will last all day, or even several days. The next two fields will change to Start Date and End Date, where you can only select dates.

Start Time/End Time: Select the dates and times that the appointment will start and end, and it will add the appointment with those times to the calendar. It defaults to the current date and time, with an End Time of one hour.

Appointment Owner: Defaults to the currently logged in user. Selecting an account here will choose an owner for this appointment.

Additional Attendees: Select all of the technicians who will be attending this appointment, and it will add one appointment to each of their calendars.

Do not email this appointment invitation: Turn on this checkbox to not send an appointment email to the customer on the ticket.
You can modify the appointment email that is sent out by navigating to: More > Admin > PDF/Email Templates > Email Templates. Once there you'll see the 'Ticket Appointment Email' and 'Non-Ticket Appointment Email', which you can modify to adjust the email that is sent when this box is turned off.

Once you fill out the required details, click Create Appointment at the bottom to create the appointment.

 

Back to top

Viewing Appointments

You can view your entire list of Appointments from the user menu.

That list looks like this:

They show up on the calendar like other items already do:

If you have sync enabled for your account, when your appointments are created they will show up on your Google Calendar as well.

Note: The calendar integration does provide a two-way sync (if enabled).

Full-Screen Calendar View

There is also an option to view the calendar with no sidebars, headers, or footers. This can be used on a larger public monitor that is set to full screen to display the calendar and the appointments to everyone in the office. You can access this view by adding "/calendar" to the end of your URL after you first click the Calendar tab.

For example, your URL would look like this: https://yourdomain.repairshopr.com/field_jobs/calendar
(where yourdomain is replaced with your subdomain)

It will look something like this.

 

Back to top

Editing Appointment Email Templates

To edit the message that gets emailed to the customer, head to More > Admin > PDF/Email Templates > Email Templates, then find the following two Appointments emails:

 

Back to top

Appointment Types

Appointment Types can be used to differentiate between, for example, Onsite, In-Shop, Phone Call, Web Meeting, etc. They will automatically select the appropriate address/note for the Location field in your calendar, and they can also trigger custom instructions to be sent to your customer.

We default to three types for all accounts, and you can change how they work completely.

The default way you use them is just select the Appointment type on a new appointment.

Editing Appointment Types

You can add and edit the appointment types in More > Admin > Appointment Types.

Once there, either click New Appointment Type, or click an existing type's name or its Edit button to view/edit it.

  • Name: The Appointment Type name.
  • Location type: Where the appointment will be held.
    • Customer's Address: Will auto fill the Location field on the appointment with the customer's address if you also selected a pre-existing ticket to attach.
    • Our Physical Address: Will auto fill the Location field on the appointment with your address set in your Account Profile.
    • Pre-Defined (hard coded here): When you select this, it pops up a Location hard code field below this dropdown. Whatever you type in that field will be auto filled into the Location field on the appointment.
    • Manual Entry (no location pre-populated): Will leave the Location field blank on the appointment.
  • Appointment reminders schedule: If you select one of the Appointment Reminder Schedules in the dropdown, it will pre-select that value in the same dropdown on a new appointment.
  • Appointment Buffer (minutes between appointments): The default time you want to set between appointments.
  • Automatically Add Ticket Charge: Assuming you selected a pre-existing ticket to attach to the appointment, start typing and select a pre-existing item from your inventory that will be added to the ticket. For example, perhaps you select a "Trip Charge" that adds a travel fee for onsite appointments.
     
    Although you can technically type and select any item in your inventory, it probably wouldn't make sense to select a physical item, like a computer monitor.
  • Appointment Instructions: Lets you provide detailed instructions based on the appointment type. For example, you could describe how and where to park or send meeting information for Zoom, Google Meet, etc. This text will be incorporated into the "Ticket Appointment Email" or "Non-Ticket Appointments Email" template wherever you insert the {{appointment_instructions}} tag.

Once you have finished creating or editing, click Save.

Back to top

All-Day Appointments

You can select an entire day quickly by checking the All Day Appointments box when creating an Appointment. The start date and end date will default for the full day you are creating the appointment but can be changed to encompass more days or different days entirely.

 

Back to top

Buffer Time

You can also optionally add buffer timing between appointments to avoid them from overlapping on each other.

Back to top

Appointment Reminders

You can build appointment reminders to send your customers that remind them of their upcoming appointments, both via email and SMS. See the second screenshot for all your options.

  1. Head to More > Admin > Appointment Reminder Schedules to start.
  2. On the next screen, you will see a list of active reminder schedules. Click the New Appointment Reminder Schedule button to create a new schedule, or click Edit next to an existing schedule.

     
  3. You will be presented with options around when reminders should be sent out.

     
  4. Name your reminder schedule.
  5. Turn on the checkboxes for sending email reminders the night before and/or the morning of if you want to do that. The 7:00 times are your local time.
  6. In addition to, or instead of, the above options for email, you can enter a custom number of hours before the appointment to send an email reminder.
  7. Likewise, you can optionally enter the number of hours before the appointment to send a reminder via SMS.
  8. If you want to override the Appointment Reminder Sms template text (click the global template link to see it), enter an SMS Reminder Message.
  9. When finished, click Save.

These schedules will be available to select on new appointments in the Appointment reminders schedule dropdown.

 

Back to top

Appointment booking module

We have an online appointment booking module! It works with or without your own website.

You can either link people to your Bookings page or use the website integration "embed code" to place the widget on your own website.

  1. Head to More > Admin > App Center.
  2. Click the Appointment Booking app card.
  3. Configure the following settings.
    1. You can copy this URL and put it on your website or perhaps in an email for people to book appointments directly on your Syncro site (see screenshot below).
    2. Use Business Hours & Holiday Schedule — Set to Yes by default, wherein it will use the settings on your Business Hours page. If you want appointment slots that are different than those, set it to No, which will cause First Available Appointment Time and Last Available Appointment Time fields to appear, along with checkboxes for Days to accept Appointments. Note that the customer facing appointment screen will look different than the screenshot below when this is set to No.
    3. Number of concurrent appointments — The maximum number of people you allow to book the same time slots.
    4. Appointment Length (in minutes) — The amount of time it will reserve when a customer books an appointment.
    5. First Available Slot (minutes from now) — The default is 120 minutes, which means when the customer goes to book an appointment, the earliest time they can reserve is two hours from "now"—the time they start the process.
    6. Minutes Between Appointments — Lets you set a buffer from when one appointment ends and the next begins.
    7. Auto-Convert Appointment Leads to Tickets when submitted — When enabled, this will not only book an appointment, but create a ticket for the customer.
    8. When finished, click Save.

Now your customers can book an appointment from your website or from the link to your Bookings page.

If Use Business Hours & Holiday Schedule is set to Yes and you have certain days or holidays selected in your Business Hours and Holiday Calendar they will be automatically crossed out when a customer is looking to book an appointment.

Note: Techs can still manually schedule time on holidays or closed days at their choosing from within the app.

How are times blocked out?

The app simply checks to see if an appointment(s) starts at the selected time, so if you set the module to allow 2 concurrent appointments, and 2 people already have an appointment on the calendar at that time, it will show that slot as unavailable.

Right now "all day" blocking appointments just block the slot that matches the start time. So, if you wanted to block out a whole day, and you use 60 minute appointments, you could make an appointment for each hour to fill up all the "slots."

Calendars for specific staff

Let's say you have different people with different skills, and you need someone to book a slot with a specific person. We have a special link for that! In the upper right, have that tech click their name > Profile/Password.

Then copy the Personal Appointment Booking URL and share it.

This link will show a calendar that only allows a single concurrent appointment, so it's really a link for a specific personal calendar. It will still respect the business hours, and those are company wide.

Time Zones

Just a quick note on the time zone support. If someone is trying to book an appointment and they are in a different time zone, they will get a prompt that they can click to view the times in their local time zone.

 

Back to top

Google Calendar & Office 365 Integrations

We built the most secure and solid integration possible using the brand new OAuth based integration system Microsoft has recently released. Some other sites on the internet require you to store your Active Directory credentials and their software logs in as you on your behalf. We store a token that is only allowed access to the calendar, not the entire active directory domain that you might be an admin of.

What it Does

  1. When you add appointments in our app, they show up in your Office 365/Google.
  2. When you update/delete our app's appointments, we sync the change to Office 365/Google.
  3. When you add appointments in Office365/Google, they show up in our app.
  4. When you delete an appointment in Office365/Google, we will delete our app's copy.

As you can see from numbers 1 and 3, this is a two-way sync.

For Office365, there is a very small delay on the sync right now (up to an hour), and that will move to real-time very soon. The Google Calendar sync works in the same way, and there is no delay. As stated previously, Office365 should be on real-time syncing very soon.

You can connect to your Google or Office 365 Calendar by clicking on your username in the upper right-hand corner, and then clicking 'My Calendars'.

Here you'll associate your account with your personal Google or Office 365 Calendar.

 

Additionally, each member of your team will associate their individual user account with their own Google account.

Once you've connected your individual account, you can enable the calendar two-way sync:

This will sync to the software and show you as busy during those times when you have non-field jobs (for example, lunches, etc.) on your Google Calendar. Your field jobs and appointments will then also show on your Google calendar.

If you want to sync each user calendar to a group calendar, just create the general company calendar and share it with each user. Make sure you share too the same user calendar e-mail address that is synced to the app.

Head to the user menu (your email in the upper right) and click "Calendars." From here just follow the instructions!

Troubleshooting

Are you syncing everything successfully in our software, but appointments still aren't showing up on your Google Calendar? It could be because your Google settings aren't setup to automatically accept the appointments that come over. To troubleshoot this:

  1. Go to your Gmail account, and login with the correct account (Google account associated with https://*****.repairshopr.com/google_calendars).
  2. Make sure you are on the calendar, and not email. If you aren't, click the Google Apps Icon in the upper right-hand part of the screen, and click Calendar.
  3. In the top right-hand part of the screen, look for the Cog wheel. Click the drop down arrow attached to it, and click settings.
  4. On the General tab, scroll to the bottom, and make sure to click Yes in the "Automatically add invitations to my calendar" option. According to Google: "If you select No, you won't see an event on your calendar unless you've responded "yes" to it. If you've shared your calendar with others, they'll still be able to see all the events even if you haven't responded yet."

This is a very likely scenario for why your integration might not be working. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to help@repairshopr.com

Also, Office 365 Home is not supported by the integration at this time.

 

Back to top

Big Chain Account

Techs/Users can change the location they are viewing by clicking the Location drop-down on the Calendar Tab.

When the user goes to make the appointment, there is a location field where they can specify the location they wish to make the appointment in.

 

Back to top

Feedback and Knowledge Base

(thinking…)