Appointments — Staff Guide

Appointments — Staff Guide

The Appointments module handles scheduling end to end: booking meetings against your services, assigning them to providers, sending reminders, taking bookings from the public form, and keeping a record of every appointment with its notes and files. This guide covers day-to-day staff use — creating and managing appointments, setting up services, controlling who sees which services, and working with attachments.

1. Where everything lives

The module's left-hand menu holds the main areas:

• Appointments — the full list of scheduled appointments and where you create new ones.
• Services — the appointment types you offer (name, duration, provider, and now segmentation).
• Company Schedule — your organisation's general availability.
• Staff Working Hours — per-provider availability, used when offering booking slots.
• Appointment History — a record of changes and past appointments.
• Analytics & Reports — volume, status, and performance views.
• Booking Form — the public-facing self-booking link and its settings.
• Settings — module configuration.

2. Creating an appointment

1. From Appointments, click Schedule Appointment.
2. Under Contact & Relationship Info, set Related — who the appointment is for. This is the key choice and it drives the rest of the form:
   • Lead — tied to a lead in the CRM.
   • External — someone not in the CRM (you enter their name, email, and phone directly).
   • Internal (Contact) — an existing customer contact.
   • Staff Only — an internal appointment with no external contact (no service is required).
3. Pick the Service for the appointment. The service list is filtered by the Related choice — see section 4.
4. Fill in the Appointment Schedule: Meeting Purpose, Date, time, Location, and Timezone.
5. Optionally expand Notes, Reminders, and Recurring to add detail (see sections 6 and 7).
6. Click Save.

Once saved, the appointment opens to its detail view, which has tabs for Appointment Details, Session Overview, and Files.

3. Services — the appointment types you offer

1. Go to Services and click to add or edit one.
2. Set the name, duration, and colour (the colour tags the service in dropdowns and calendars).
3. Assign a Provider/Staff so the right person is attached and their working hours apply.
4. Optionally set buffer times and a description.
5. Set the segmentation fields — Customer Groups and Lead Sources — described next.
6. Save.

4. Service segmentation — showing the right services to the right audience

If you run more than one business or brand out of the system, not every service applies to every audience. Segmentation keeps each service scoped so staff and bookers only see what is relevant, instead of one long combined list.

On each service you can set two optional filters:

• Customer Groups — restrict the service to one or more CRM customer groups.
• Lead Sources — restrict the service to one or more lead sources.

The rule to remember: empty means everyone. A service with no groups and no sources selected is available to all — this is the default, so existing services keep working unchanged. Add a group or source only when you want to narrow the service to that audience.

Here is how the filter behaves when you create an appointment, based on the Related choice:

• Internal (Contact) → the Service list shows services that are unrestricted or mapped to one of that customer's groups.
• Lead → the Service list shows services that are unrestricted or mapped to that lead's source.
• External and Staff Only → there is no contact to read a group or source from, so only unrestricted services appear.
• Public Booking Form → the same logic as External: only unrestricted services are offered publicly, since there is no logged-in contact.

Editing is deliberately not filtered. When you edit an existing appointment, the full service list is shown so the originally chosen service never disappears — even if the contact's group or the service's segmentation changed later.

5. Files — attaching documents to an appointment

Each appointment has a Files tab for storing documents against it — intake forms, signed paperwork, reference images, and so on.

1. Open the appointment and go to the Files tab.
2. Upload by clicking Choose Files or by dragging files onto the drop area. You can upload several at once.
3. Each file shows its name, size, and upload date, with actions on the right.

Preview. PDFs and images have a Preview (eye) button that opens the file in an overlay right on the page — no download needed. PDFs render in the browser's built-in viewer; images display fitted to the window. A Download button is always available in the preview, and non-previewable types (documents, spreadsheets, archives) can be downloaded directly.

Delete. Files can be removed with the trash action. Uploading and deleting require edit permission on appointments; viewing and downloading require view permission.

Limits. There is a size cap per file (10 MB by default) and an allow-list of accepted types — common images, PDFs, Office documents, text files, and archives. If a file is rejected, check its type and size first.

6. Reminders

Expand the Reminders section on an appointment to have attendees and the contact notified before it starts (for example 30 minutes prior). Reminders can go out by email and/or by SMS (SMS requires a configured gateway). Tick the channels you want.

Reminders are sent by the background schedule, so this feature requires the cron job to be running. From an appointment you can also manually send reminders to all attendees on demand.

7. Recurring appointments

Use the Recurring section to repeat an appointment on a schedule instead of creating each one by hand. Set the pattern when booking; the system generates the repeats. A recurring series can be stopped later — stopping it prevents new instances from being created without deleting the ones already made.

8. Statuses

Appointments move through these statuses so everyone can see where each one stands:

• Pending — booked but not yet actioned.
• In Progress — currently underway.
• Completed — finished.
• Cancelled — called off.
• No Show — the contact did not attend.

Keeping status current is what makes Analytics & Reports and the completed/cancelled counts meaningful.

9. The public Booking Form

The Booking Form gives contacts a self-service link to book without staff involvement. It offers your available services (unrestricted ones only — see section 4), respects Company Schedule and Staff Working Hours for available slots, and creates the appointment automatically. Bookings then appear in the Appointments list like any other.

10. Good to know

• Related drives the form. The Lead / External / Internal / Staff Only choice decides which fields appear and which services are offered.
• Empty segmentation = available to all. Only add a Customer Group or Lead Source to a service when you want to restrict it.
• Edit is unfiltered on purpose. A saved service always stays visible when you edit an appointment.
• Preview before downloading. PDFs and images open in an overlay; use Download for everything else.
• Reminders need cron. Automatic reminders only fire if the background schedule is running.
• Keep statuses current. Reports and dashboards are only as accurate as the statuses you set.