We have been working hard to simplify addition of client facing pages (account management/appointment booking) to your website. However, we do realize that it is a bit confusing if you need to add these pages within an iframe on your site.  We were just reviewing some of the client pages, and noticed that a few of you have added links to these pages using the URL that is meant for embedding them in an iframe.  As a result, your logo and business information do not appear on these pages, and they look a bit weird.

We are working on simplifying the settings for client pages. Once this work is complete, you’ll have the option to explicitly choose between (i)  SimplifyThis displaying your logo and business name on these pages, or (ii) you would do it yourself , embedding these pages in an iframe. In the interim, please make a note of the following:

(i) If you are displaying the pages standalone and would like your logo + business information to appear on the page, select the option ‘ Show pages with my logo and address’. You’ll be asked to choose a unique sub-domain name.

(ii) If, however, you need to embed  the pages within an iframe, select the option ‘Do not show logo and address’.  This option will also allow you to customize the CSS for these pages so that you can match them with the outer page.

Please feel free to drop us a note or give us a call if you have any questions.

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.

Well, I thought the best way to start posting in new year is to announce a major feature upgrade. So here it is: Now you can have multiple auto-bills per client.  Many businesses run more than one billing cycle for a client.  This feature is especially useful for them.  I have received many requests from hosting service providers who charge a monthly hosting fee and an annual domain name fee.  Since we had the limitation of only one auto-bill cycle per client, we used to suggest them to manually add line items for annual charges - admittedly not the best solution.  From here on, if you have clients that you need to invoice with more than one separate billing cycles, all you need to do is to create an auto-bill for each cycle.

You’ll also notice some changes in the “Activities” section. Now that there can be multiple auto-bills for each client, we thought that it would be important for you to take a quick look at all of them.  So we have divided activities into 2 tabs, Account and Auto-Bill.  Under account, you will see all the invoices and payments. When you click on ‘Auto-Bill’ tab, you’ll see all the auto-bills for the selected client, along with frequency of billing, next invoice date, previous invoice date, total number of invoices remaining and sent, and links for editing or deleting the auto-bill.

We do hope you find this useful. Please do let us know if there is anything that we can change or add to this feature to make it more relevant for your business.