Online Scheduling System

A quick feature update : Now you can group your services and classes and order them within a group so that it is easier for your clients to look for them.  This also allows you to promote certain services by moving them at the top of the list. Another use is to keep the most frequently booked services at the top.  I’m sure you’ll find many reasons to use this feature. Here are a few things to note while using this feature.

1. To group and order services (or classes), go to the corresponding tab and click on the orange group icon.  You can simply order your services by moving them up and down.
2. If you would like to group services, simply add a group and drag and drop services into that group. Once you have grouped your services, your client(s) will have to first select a group and then they will see the services within that group.
3. If you have not added a group yet, all services will appear in a ‘Default’ group. If ‘Default’ is the only group that you have, your clients will not have to select a group. If you have added other groups and then you still have services that belong to ‘Default’, they will appear in a group called ‘All Others’ on your booking page.
4. When you add a new service, you can create a new group by typing in the name in group selector. You can also add the item to an existing group by selecting the group, or you can leave the group filed blank, in which case it will be added to the ‘Default’ group.
5. All new items are added to the top of their group by default.

We hope this feature will prove useful to you.  Please drop us a note if you have any suggestion or feedback.

Buy a 3 pack massage and save 10%, or 12 yoga classes for the price of 10, or a  Welcome Package that includes a basketball, a t-shirt and 5 group basketball lessons – you get the idea behind packages.  This functionality lets you create and sell a bundle of services, items, and classes, and then track as clients use packages to book appointments and classes.  This post goes over the key features of packages and explains how they can be used.

Key Features

The package functionality allows you to create a bundle of services, classes, and items and sell them together as a package.  Clients can then use the package to book future appointments and classes, and you can track their usage.  Following are the main features:

1. Stuff in a package: A package can include more than one service, class, item, or a combination thereof.  For example, a gym can create an introductory package that includes 3 month membership, a fitness check exam, and two 30 minute personal training sessions.  To specify what goes in a package, while creating  a package, select the items and classes, and specify the number of units for each of them.
2. Expiration: A package can expire. You can choose the number of days that a package expires after the date of purchase. Your clients will not be able to use the package once it expires.  Select the expiration period in Valid for field while creating a package.  You can also choose to keep a package valid for ever, as if it never expires.
3. Duration of Sale: You can decide how long is a package available for sale.  This lets you create special seasonal or event packages that are not available after the season or event.
4. Track Package Sales: Once you have a package for sale, you would want to then track the clients who have bought the package, and view how much have they used.  To do so, all you need to do is click on a package, and you’ll see the purchase history below, including account name, date of purchase, available/used, and a link to view the usage history.

Selling Packages

Now that you know the features of Package, and perhaps have created a package, let’s look into the more interesting part of selling it and having your clients use it.

There are several ways to sell a package. You can place a ‘Buy Now’ button on your website for each package, subtly let a client see  a package when s/he is booking an appointment or a class, or sell directly from the admin console while seeing the client face to face or placing a phone order.

‘Buy Now’ buttons: What better way to promote a package than to put a nice ‘Buy Now’ button.  Click on a package and select the option ‘Generate Buy Button’ to get the code for ‘Buy Now’ button that you can place on your website to sell the package.  Your website visitors can then click on this button, enter their information, and pay for the package to buy it.

Sell package when clients schedule appointment: As a business person, you always try to provide the best value to your clients.  If you are in massage business and a client comes to buy a single massage, you would probably suggest the saving of a 5 pack  and in turn secure a bigger sale for yourself.  Why not let clients what packages you are offering while they are booking.  To do so, all you need to do is go to ‘Settings’ -> ‘Appointment Preferences’ -> ‘Rules for Website Appointments’ and select the option to show packages to clients.  Now, whenever your clients book an appointment, they’ll see the packages that have the service/class they are booking for, along with the money saving benefits of the package.  They also have the option to either select a package and use it for booking, or directly proceed with the booking without buying a package.  Of course, if you also select the option to require clients to book from package only, they would have to either select a package that they have already bought or buy a new one.

Sell package directly: In addition to selling from the website, you can also sell packages directly to the clients.  Click on the package that you want to sell, and choose the option to ‘Add Subscription’. Select the client you are selling the package, and also select the option to create a charge if you want to invoice the package and get paid for it.  Selecting the option to charge will automatically create a line item for the package that will be included in the subsequent statement or invoice.

Using a Package

Once your client buys a package, they can use it for booking subsequent appointments and classes from your website.  In addition, if you directly book an appointment for your client or enroll them for a class, you can always mark the appointment or class to be counted towards the package.

Use package while booking appointment/class: When your clients book an appointment/class, and they already have an unused packages that includes that class/appointment, the package will automatically be used for the booking.  If the client has more than one unexpired package for the item, all the packages will be shown and the client will be able to pick the one s/he wants to use.

Use package for an already booked appointment/class: So, what if you book an appointment/class over phone or using the admin screen, or the client purchased a package after booking the appointment, and you would let the client use the package retroactively.  All you need to do is select the package, and then click on ‘View Usage’ -’Add Usage’, and select the item that you want to include in the package.

That is all for now as far as packages go. We’ll be publishing a post on FAQs about packages as soon as we get some questions from you.

Over last few months, we have released many features and made several improvements to Simplifythis. However, we forgot to write about them, since they were easily visible and so commonly used.  In November 2010, we launched packages – the capability to sell a bundle of services and classes, and for clients to book appointments by using the pre-purchased packages.  In December 2010, we provided the option to require clients to register and sign-in to book appointments. While January 2011 was fairly dull in terms of new features, there was a good reason behind it.  We had been working feverishly bring a huge update to Simplifythis with the following major new features in addition numerous bug fixes and minor updates.

1. Multiple Schedules with Effective Dates : Ever had a situation where you needed to change business hours in future, or perhaps shift lunch break to a different time?  To accommodate these common scenarios, we have introduced a notion of schedule.  You can create multiple schedules with effective dates in future.  We have added two tabs in appointment book, availability and schedule, which give you a quick view at  availability and schedule hours for any staff for any day.  This will make your schedule management much much easier.  No more juggling of vacations and dummy appointments to block schedules.  A small paragraph cannot do justice to this feature.  Here is a more detailed post on how to effectively manage schedules.
2. Staff Schedules: In addition to multiple  business schedules, we have also added the capability to specify separate schedule for each staff.   Just like the main business schedule, you can specify multiple schedules with future effective dates.
3. Availability Check:
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   Want to take a quick glance at who is available when?  Try the new availability tab on you appointment book. You can clearly see availability of each staff, one week at a time.  This will be of significant help in balancing schedule across multiple staff members, and quickly finding availability to schedule appointments over phone.

4. New and Improved Slot Selection: We are sure you are going to love the new availability view and slot selection screens.  It is blazing fast, looks elegant, and shows available slots for one whole week at a time, with a quick slider to back and forth to previous and next weeks.  Your clients are going to love the simplicity of scheduling appointments with you.
5. Appointment Visibility for Clients: Do you get interrupted by client calls asking you when their next appointment is (despite all the email confirmations !).  Well, with this update, your clients can securely sign in to view their past and future appointments, check payment status, and also cancel appointments if you set the option to do so.
6. Staff Specific Services:
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   While we all aspire to be jack of all trades ( and master of all), the reality is that not every staff can perform every service that your business offers.  With this release, you can pick who can perform what service.  When your clients select a service, they will only see those staff who can perform that service.  If you choose not to show them the list of staff, then Simplifythis will automatically assign the appointment to one of the staffs who can perform the selected service.

We believe these additions will make Simplifythis ever more useful for your business.  We have a very full schedule in coming months with even more useful product additions.  As always, feedback is welcome.  Please drop us a note and let us know what you think about these features.

Simplifythis provides an easy to manage and yet very flexible schedule system.  This is a quick and dry overview of features of schedule.

Who’s Schedule : You can create  separate schedule for the whole business,( referred to as ‘Main Schedule’) , for a location, or for a staff.  If a staff follows the same schedule as that of a location, you don’t need to create a separate schedule for this staff.  Simplifythis will automatically use the schedule of the location that the staff belongs  to in case there is no schedule for this staff.  Extending the same notion, if a location follows the same schedule as that of the main business, then there is no need to create a separate schedule for the location.

Schedule Effective From : While creating a schedule, you’ll notice that you need to specify ‘Effective From’ date.  This is the date that the schedule becomes effective from.  You can create several schedules in advance with separate ‘Effective From’ dates.  This works well if you have separate schedule for spring, or summer, or holidays etc.  Now, given so many schedules, you must be wondering which one is going to be used on any particular date.  Simplifythis will pick the latest schedule that starts prior to any give date.  Another way to look at it  is that a schedule expires when it finds another schedule starting.

Let’s go through an example to understand this better.  Say you have 3 schedules, one starting Jan 1, 2011, another one starting May 1, 2011, and the third one starting on Sep. 1, 2011.  Then for all the days between Jan 1 and April 30 (both inclusive), Simplifythis will use the first schedule. All days between May 1 and August 31 (both inclusive), will use the second schedule and so on.

Repeating Schedules : While most people keep a weekly repeating schedule, we have also come across businesses with schedules that repeat every two week or every three week.  When you create a schedule (be it for a staff, location, or main business), it defaults to repeating every week.  However, you have an option to add additional week(s).  So, if you want a schedule that repeats itself every 2 weeks, just specify the hours for each of the two weeks, select an effective from date, and save the schedule.

To further illustrate the use of schedules, let’s look at some of the common scenarios.

I run a solo massage therapy practice.  I work 5 days a week (Tue  - Sat) from 10 to 8 with a 1 hour lunch break from 2 PM to 3  PM.

Add a main schedule that repeats every week. Un-check Sunday and Monday, and for remaining days of the week, specify two blocks of hours : 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM and 3:00 PM to 8:00 PM.

I plan on taking a dance class from 6 to 8 on Wednesdays and will need to close early.
Add a new schedule and modify hours for Wednesday such that it looks like 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM and 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM.

I have just hired another therapist.  She will be working on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays and will have her own hours.
Add the new therapist as a staff member. Create a schedule for her that is effective from her date of joining. Un-check Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.  Specify hours for Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

I want to take every other Saturday off.
Create a new schedule for yourself from the Staff section.  Make this schedule repeat every two week. Edit the schedule for second week and un-check Saturday.

I will be closing early during holidays.
Create a new schedule with the appropriate ‘Effective From’ date near the holidays.  Select desired hours for each of the weekday.

We formally announced the availability of invoicing interface for iPhone and Android.  If you have been touting an iPhone,  you can further expand on its business use by recording charges, adding or updating your client details, or sending invoices. To access these feature, point your phone browser to https://app.simplifythis.com/m.  And to avoid typing the url again and again, we recommend adding the page to your home screen.  And one word of caution: If you have a tendency to lose your phone, make sure to log out after use; the authentication is valid for long to save you from the trouble of entering your user id and password every time.

Very soon, we’ll add project and time tracking to it as well.  If you have any other suggestion on SimplifyThis features that you would like to use from your iPhone, do let us know. We’ll try to get them in the next update.

Thanks to many suggestions from SimplifyThis users, we have a new fresh look for the invoices and estimates.  You’ll notice that there is more “breathing room

” between fields and their labels, notes stand out clearly, and your business address goes right next to your logo at the top of the invoice.

I’m sure this new look will spark some discussions.  Please do provide your feedback. Let us know whether you like it or not, or write to us if you have any suggestion to improve the layout further.

Recently, we saw the announcement on Palm Pre (old news, I know).  Garmin and Asus are also coming up with their own OS.  And then you have Symbian, WinMo, Blackberry with over 1 million Storms sold,  Android our favorite: iPhone. Needless to say, it is difficult for us to build installable applications for all these phone platforms,and keep them up to date with the rapid feature additions to SimplifyThis.  Luckily, all these platforms provide decent browser support.  So, we have decided that instead of building individual applications for each of them, we would instead build a browser based user interface that is optimized for the small screen.   We are impressed with Apple’s webapp framework, and that is what we are using to build this new interface.

The preliminary screens look beautiful and very user friendly, almost as good as native iPhone applications.  We are simultaneously able to test the phone interface on Andriod phones also courtsey of a friend who lent his T-Mobile G1 for some time, and are pleasantly surprised with how well it works.

We hope to make this phone user interface available within next two weeks.  I would not say much about the list of features that this interface will support at this point, but we are trying to make it fully functional for sending invoices.  I’m sure many of you will use it and enjoy it.  While we may not be able to test it on all phones, we would look for your feedback on how this performs on other phones.

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.

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.