Have you thought about taking a deposit from your clients when they book an appointment? Are you seeing ‘no-shows’ and looking for ways to reduce it? Or do just want to feel more secure that the clients will show up at the scheduled time?  Requiring payments before confirming appointment may just be the right thing for you.

We have added this feature just a couple of days ago.  With this, now you can require your clients to put a deposit before they can confirm their appointment.  The appointment booking process remains as simple as it was earlier: select a service, a staff, a date, a time-slot, and confirm.  However, when you turn-on the pre-payment option, your client will be asked to make a deposit (via Paypal or credit cards, if you have enabled them).  If they fail to make the deposit, the appointment will be saved in a pending state, so that you can contact them directly and follow-up.

You can also decide the pre-payment amount; it could either be a fixed amount or a percentage of service fee.  A successful payment will automatically be recorded in client’s account.  To enable this feature, go to ‘Settings’ and then ‘Appointment Preferences’.

As always, we believe you’ll find this useful.  Feel free to drop us a note if you have any suggestion.

Simplifythis has two online products:

1. Easy-Bill. Simple, easy-to-use and professional online invoicing for your smbiz
2. Easy-Book. User-friendly scheduling and booking app for your customers

These two tools are perfect for smbiz such as spas, body shops and independent contractors (don’t worry, this blog post isn’t just a shameless plug…I’ll make my point soon). As chief marketer, it’s obvious I need to reach out to ST’s potential customers. Social media is supposed to help businesses connect with their customers but there are thousands of these smbiz! If I want to reach a large audience, looks like I’ll have to send an e-mail to as many smbiz as I can. So here’s my to-do list:

• Build a massive, random list of potential smbiz
• Draft a concise e-mail that describes ST’s products
• Hire an e-mail marketing firm to make it look snazzy
• Click “send” and hope for the best

What do you think? After discussing, ST’s founder thought this strategy had a low ROI potential and a huge potential for wasting time.

Many firms and people get gung-ho about the to-do list without thinking about aligning actions with strategy. Each bullet point in the list above is easy to complete. Why, any brain-dead moron could do it (i.e. yours truly)! But taking a step back and thinking critically - that’s the hard part. Trial and error is useful but spending more time thinking can save time, money and a few trials. In our case, implementing - and tracking results of - an e-mail marketing campaign can be expensive and time-consuming.

So ST has a different to-do list. Rather than targeting a bunch of end users impersonally via mass e-mail, we compiled a small list of web designers whom we will approach for partnerships. As an ST partner, web designers include our products in their portfolio of services at no cost. In short, ST partners have more services to offer to their clients (and receive commission when they sell our products) and we get a multiplier effect since their clients can also become our clients.

Lesson? Get excited about strategy before getting excited about the easy stuff. And now for the plug

Do you know of any Web site designers who would be interested in becoming an ST partner? If so, let them know (http://tinyurl.com/STpartner)!

SimplifyThis did not have a way to send out automated annual invoices.  I had been skirting away from this in the past, hiding under the illusion that people can use a frequency of 365 days to approximate annual cycles.  Apparently, this was not good enough for many of you.  Frankly, I was surprised to see the number of annual auto-billing cycles.  I never thought that this would be the case.

Upon insistance from users, we have added an explicit annual frequency option in auto-bill.  This feature is deployed as of now.  So all the hosting service providers who bill their clients annualy for domain name, or annual set-up fee can now use this option.  As always, please do let me know if you have any feedback.

I have also received request for explicit quarterly auto-bill frequency.  I was tempted to add it while we were enabling annual cycle, but then realized that adding one more option would warrant an interface change.  Having too many options with radio-buttons to choose from would not be a good idea.  So, we’ll keep this for the next round.

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.

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.

It is always good to know the way people are using SimplifyThis. A couple of days after releasing auto-billing feature, I got a call from a music teacher asking about the best way to handle credits with automated billing. She is an music teacher and she bills her students in advance for monthly tuition. This part is simple as she can just setup a monthly auto-bill schedule for her students. The complication comes from her generosity. Unlike many others, she gives credit for missed and cancelled lessons. She wanted to know if there is any way to include these credits in the following month’s invoice while still using the auto-bill schedule.

There is an easy way to handle such credits with SimplifyThis. All she needed to do was to select “include unbilled charges” in the auto-bill schedule. Whenever she needs to issue a credit, she would enter a credit in the unbilled charge section. The next invoice created by auto-bill will automatically pick these credits and apply it to the invoice.