I did not get a chance to write more about how you can use recurring appointments when we released this major feature. Here are some possible scenarios that will help you in using this feature.

1. Rescheduling an occurrence or a series: If you have booked a recurring appointment and want to reschedule a particular occurrence, you can do so easily without modifying the recurring series. Just open the calendar view and click on the occurrence that you want to reschedule. You’ll notice an option to modify the selected occurrence or the entire series. Select the option which will launch the appointment edit form. Select new time and save. This will reschedule the regular occurrence. You’ll also notice the option to send cancellation email for regular occurrence and confirmation email for the new appointment.Also, as you would expect, your client and staff will get a reminder email for the rescheduled occurrence and not for the original occurrence.Keep in mind that if you happen to modify or reschedule an series, any particular occurrence that you may have rescheduled will get canceled.

2. Canceling a recurring appointment: You can either choose to cancel an entire recurring series, or a single occurrence. Just hover over one of the occurrence in the calendar view and you’ll notice a red ‘x’ on top right corner. Click on ‘x’ and you’ll get an option to either cancel the occurrence or the entire series. If you cancel an occurrence, your client and staff will get cancellation email for that occurrence alone. If you cancel the whole series, they will get one email for the cancellation of the series. Keep in mind that if you happen to cancel a series, any particular occurrence that you may have rescheduled will also get canceled.

3. Lunch hours: Blocking lunch hour is a good use of recurring appointments. To do so, create a new recurring appointment that occurs weekly. Select the staff for whom you are blocking lunch time. Make the recurrence occur every 1 week, and select all the work days of the week. This also gives you the flexibility to unblock or change the lunch hour on a particular day if you need to. Just double click on the occurrence that you want to change, and select “Edit this occurrence“.

4. Bi-weekly appointments: If you need to book appointments that occur bi-weekly, just create a recurring appointment that occurs weekly, and make it recur every 2 weeks. Your calendar will be scheduled with appointments occurring every alternate week.

5. Quarterly Appointments: For quarterly appointments, create a recurring appointment that occurs monthly, and make it recur every 3 months. Select the day of month that you would the appointment to occur on, and save to schedule your quarterly appointment.

I am sure I have not covered all the scenarios. Look for subsequent posts as we get more questions from our users and come across interesting usage of this feature.

Here is the second feature update for this week: Now you can two tax fields on the invoices that you send out.  Many of you collect 2 separate taxes and report them separately.  Well, you don’t need to bundle them anymore in a single tax field, you can now separate them out in two different fields.

However, since most of you do not need this additional field, you’ll not see it when you create an invoice or setup your default tax rate.  You would need to customize your invoice structure and enable the 2nd tax field if you need to use this.  Follow these steps to do so:

1. Go to Settings and click on change next to Invoice and Tax Preferences.
2. Click on Customize button under My Invoice Type to customize your invoice.
3. Select the 2nd Tax field and enter the appropriate label for this field.
4. Click on Save. Verify that you like the invoice structure by clicking on View next to Invoice Type.

After this, whenever you create an invoice, you’ll notice a second tax field with the appropriate label.

We are currently not providing a default rate for the second tax field.  However, if we see that many of you are using this field, we’ll do so.  We also do not have reports on tax by field, but we will provide these reports very shortly.

We do hope that our friends north of border (and many of you in the US who collect county taxes) will be able to use this feature.  Do drop us a note if you have any suggestion.

Here it is, finally.  We have been talking about it for a long time with many of SimplifyThis users, but we could not finish and test it properly any sooner.  Well, finally we have deployed the much needed and sought after feature for Easy-Book : Recurring Appointments.  This is an important milestone for SimplifyThis.  This gives us the underpinnings to build several interesting solutions that are When you login the next time and book an appointment, you’ll notice a option for recurring appointment.  Select this option and you are on your way to creating a recurring appointment that occurs at a frequency that you decide.

For now, here is a brief overview of  this feature.  Subsequently I’ll make several posts on how best to use recurring appointments for your business.

To book a recurring appointment , follow the same steps as you do to book a one-time appointment.  Select the start time as the date and time of first occurrence, and  end time as the ending time of this occurrence.You’ll notice an option for recurring appointment.  Once you select this option, the booking form will expand to show you further options related to recurring appointments.

There are three choices to specify the frequency of occurrences.  You can choose from daily, weekly, or monthly options, and specify the number of times that you want this appointment to occur.  If you select daily option, you will also need to specify the number of days between two appointments.  So, if you want a daily appointment, specify 1; or 2 if you want the appointments to occur every other day. For a week pattern,  select the weekly option and specify the days of week that you want the appointments to occur, as well as the number of weeks between each recurring pattern.  For example, if you want appointments to occur Mondays and Wednesdays every other week, select Monday and Wednesday, and specify 2 in Every n weeks.  Similarly, for a monthly pattern, select monthly option, specify day of month when you would like the appointment to occur, and the number of months between two occurrences.

If you choose to send appointment confirmation to your clients or staff, they will receive the appointment details containing the recurrence information.  In addition, depending upon your reminder setting, they will also get reminder email for each occurrence.

The list of appointments that you see in Today section shows you each occurrence of a recurring appointment.  Just like a one time appointment, you can cancel an individual occurrence or send reminder for an occurrence.  However, we do not have the implementation of charging for an occurrence yet - something that we’ll work on soon.   Hope you find this useful. As usual, please drop us a note about your experience with the feature.

No, this is not an automotive blog, or financial or political blog for that matter. But with all the hoopla around bailout of the Big Three automakers, it is kind of hard to not think and talk about it. There is a lot of debate for or against the bailout with ideas ranging from rapid evolution of product line to higher fuel efficiency, favorable union contract, trimming down model lines and dealerships are all being talked about.

People are pointing out the inefficiencies in auto business, and some of them have found a place in the viability plans put together by Big Three. However, there is one thing that I feel is still so sorely missing: complete dissolution of dealerships and overhaul of auto sales model which is totally off the age, inefficient, and obsolete. Rick Wagoner talks about cutting down GM dealerships to 4700; how about having a goal of get it to a big 0 (yes indeed zero) over next 5 years or so. They all admit that it is a huge component of their cost that is built into the cost of the vehicles and is passed on to us, the consumers. I believe if they do so, not only will they become a lot more efficient, they will also tremendously improve the buying experience – a huge component of making your product more attractive and competitive.

Dealerships are obsolete

Dealerships serve 3 main purposes: 1. Provide product information and experience, 2. Influence buying decision to make the sale, and 3. Keep stock and deliver vehicles. However, dealerships are inherently inefficient and expensive in performing all these 3 functions. People do not need them to get information on vehicles anymore.

There is internet and plethora of sites and blogs that provide ample information, comparison, pros and cons about every vehicle and blogs that talk about trends and upcoming models. And information that people don’t get at dealerships: firsthand experience from existing owners; there are user forums on almost each model year where owners talk about the problems with the vehicle and experience of ownership. There is no need to have a dealership or a sales person for this purpose anymore. People are amply educated about their buying options and can make their own choices. Same goes with financing products if they need to finance their vehicles.

A dealership’s ability to influence buying decision is still there, but realize that it goes only one way – if dealerships try to influence it (through pricing and haggle gimmickry), it just detracts informed buyers from buying the vehicle. The positive influence is long gone. And informed we all are, usually more than they are about their own vehicles. In lieu, automakers can adopt a direct internet based sales model with no-haggle pricing. This will be a much more pleasant buying experience. Surely, automakers can keep several showrooms for those of us who need to touch before we buy.

Similarly, the role of dealerships in holding inventory and delivering the vehicles to consumers makes the industry as a whole even more inefficient. Automakers have no direct control over this inventory that they should be shift easily following the demand. In addition it fuels prices wars between dealerships which ultimately hurts the automaker.

It is time for big 3 to follow the airlines. Not that the airlines are a paragon of efficiency, but at least they have adopted technology well to market their products and sell tickets more efficiently, moving from the traditional travel agent network.