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All of this centers around how to make your Appointments > Calendar and Appointments > Availability views more suited for what you and your business care about.
As with many things in life, how the calendar displays on your Appointments screen may not be exactly how you want it right out of the box. The good thing about your calendar is that you can change it to fit exactly what you want to see (not so true with some of those other things in life). The following changes are only applied on a per user basis.
In order to customize how your calendar displays, go to your Appointments screen and select Settings:
This will bring up your list of Calendar View Defaults settings which offers a number of options that you can tweak to meet your needs:
The options you can configure are:
- Default View: You can set it so that each time you login your Calendar goes to the Day, Week, or Month view by default depending on your preference
- Show or Hide Weekends: If you don't take appointments on the weekends, then they may just be taking up unnecessary space on your screen. You can hide them from view by deselecting the checkbox next to "Show Weekends".
- Appointment Calendar Starts on: This will configure what day of the week you want your calendar view to start on. If you choose "Current Day" then whenever you login the calendar will start one whatever day it currently is. (so if you login on a Tuesday, the start day will be Tuesday; if you login on a Wednesday the start day will be Wednesday; etc.)
- Show External Calendar Appointments: If you want to see all the events that are imported from any external calendar you're syncing your TimeTap account with (like Google, iCal, Outlook, Office 365, etc) on your TimeTap calendar view, you can check the checkbox next to "Show External Calendar Appointments" to display them on your calendar
Empty Class Sessions: By default, all of the class sessions that you have added to your schedule will show on your calendar view regardless of whether or not they have clients on their attendees list. You can hide any of the class sessions that don't have any registered clients in them by deselecting the checkbox next to "Show Empty Class Sessions".or Hide Empty Class Sessions: This allows you to see/hide all scheduled sessions for your classes on your calendar, even if no clients have registered for them - Show Attendees List for Class Sessions on Calendar: This will hide/show the list of attendees from the displaying underneath the class title on the calendar view
- Redirect to Appointment Detail Upon Saving: If you want to be redirected to the appointment detail page after saving an appointment from the add one time appointment screen flow, select this option. Otherwise if it's left unselected, we'll return you to the main Appointment menu page
- Show Location Groups Instead of Location: If you have added location groups, this options allow you to toggle on and off appointments by the location group instead of the individual locations
- Time Off Override Color: If you want all of your time offs to show in one color regardless of whose schedule they're on or what they're for, you can set that color in this field. This will only impact the Calendar view, not the availability view
- Text Color on Calendar/Availability view: This determines what color the title/description of the appointment appears in in your Appointments > Calendar and Appointments > Availability views. By default it is white (or #fff in hexadecimal)
- Available Time Block Color on Availability View: This changes the color that available time slots show on the Availability view
- Calendar Start Time: This determines what hour of the day your Appointments > Calendar view loads starting at. If you offer early morning appointments, you may want to set this earlier than our default of 7am so that you see those early morning appointments as soon as you login
- Availability View Interval: It may not seem like much, but your Appointments > Availability view is a heavy screen. By default it loads every single one of your staff's availability in 5 minute increments. This can make the loading of that screen take longer than you might need, particularly if you don't offer appointments in such narrow increments as 5 minutes. You can adjust this to a higher setting to make that screen load faster. For most accounts 30 or 15 minute increments will do
- Availability View Description Display: This determines how your description appears under Appointments > Availability. By default it will show the description both as inline text and as a tooltip, but you can change it here so that it only shows as one or the other
- Turn Off Appointment Quick Edit: This will make it so that as soon as you click on the appointment, you'll go into its details instead of getting the quick edit pop over
Once you've adjusted these settings to match what you want to see, press the "Save" button and then click on the Calendar or Availability view to see the changes:
Changes made to the Business Level Calendar and Appointment View Details section apply to all staff members.
In order to customize how your calendar displays, go to your Appointments screen and select Settings:
This will bring up your list of Calendar View Defaults settings, scroll to until you find the Business Level Calendar and Appointment View Details:
The options you can configure are:
- Calendar View Description for Service Appointments: This is how you can change what the title reads as in your appointment on your Calendar view. This field is tag enabled (click here to learn more about using tags) and can use any of the tags that are associated with appointments or clients. By default it reads as "%CLIENT_FULLNAME% for %REASON% with %STAFF_FULLNAME%". So if I had a Consultation appointment with Jane Doe, it would read as "Jane Doe for Consultation with Lucy Barber". This is only for services, not for Classes.
- Availability View Interval: It may not seem like much, but your Appointments > Availability view is a heavy screen. By default it loads every single one of your staff's availability in 5 minute increments. This can make the loading of that screen take longer than you might need, particularly if you don't offer appointments in such narrow increments as 5 minutes. You can adjust this to a higher setting to make that screen load faster. For most accounts 30 or 15 minute increments will do
Availability View Description for Service Appointments: This is how you can change what the title reads as in your appointment on your Availability view. This is very similar to the Calendar View Description noted in the bullet point above, except this field impacts what you see on the Appointments > Availability screen instead. This field is tag enabled (click here to learn more about using tags) and can use any of the tags that are associated with appointments or clients. By default it reads as "%APPT_START_TIME_STAFF% - %APPT_END_TIME_STAFF% %REASON% %CLIENT_FULLNAME%". So if I had a 9am - 10am Consultation appointment with Jane Doe, it would read as "9:00am - 10:00am Consultation Jane Doe". This is only for services, not for Classes.
Availability View Description Display: This determines how your description appears under Appointments > Availability. By default it will show the description both as inline text and as a tooltip, but you can change it here so that it only shows as one or the other
Once you've adjusted these settings to match what you want to see, press the "Save" button and then click on the Calendar or Availability view to see the changes:
- Client Fields to Show in Appointment Detail: This section will give a list of all your client fields, check which details about the client you'd like to display int he appointment detail screen
- Show if No Preference Was Selected: If you have "No Preference" turned on in the staff page of your scheduling flow, then by checking this option TimeTap will show you on the appointment detail page whether or not the client selected no preference when booking
- Turn Off Appointment Quick Add: If you'd prefer to have your staff always go to the add appointment screen when clicking on the calendar, check this option
One of TimeTap's biggest benefits is how customizable it is to your business's particular needs. One such example of this customization is how you can configure how the description for your appointments appear on your calendar view for your business.
The text that displays on the calendar is made dynamic by using tags (click here to learn more about using tags) which merge values that are stored on the appointment into text that displays on the calendar view. The default description that is added on the calendar event is "%CLIENT_FULLNAME% for %REASON% with %STAFF_FULLNAME%" which would fill in with the respective values (i.e. the tag %CLIENT_FULLNAME% would fill in with the name of the client).
Since that is the default description, then if I as a staff member have the service "Consultation" scheduled with my client "Jane Doe", the event that shows on my calendar would have the description "Jane Doe for Consultation with Lucy Barber", as shown below:
You may, however, care about different details around the appointment that you'd like to have displayed here. Maybe for you, you want to see the client's cell phone number in that view. By looking at the list of tag values, we can see that the tag we'd want to use is %CLIENT_MOBILE_PHONE%.
My next step is to add that tag to the calendar description. To do this I'll go to Appointments > Settings to find the "Calendar View Description for Service Appointments" field:
I'm going to change the text that I have stored in there so that it includes that tag I'm interested in: %CLIENT_MOBILE_PHONE%
Since I've included that tag, then when I go back to look at the calendar view under Appointments > Calendar, I'm going to see the client's name and phone number in the description:
Again, good documentation to familiarize yourself with on this front is how to use tags and what tags we have available. If you are trying to get your calendar to display something specific and can't figure out how to do that, simply write our support team with the specifics of what you'd like it to show and we'd be happy to help you with that.
One thing that we strive for at TimeTap is making the app really customizable for your particular business needs. We know all too well that what works for one business doesn't work for the next so we've made TimeTap easy to adjust based on your personal preferences. One such way we've done this is by making the descriptive text you see on the appointment under Appointments > Availability adjustable based on what information your business is concerned with seeing.
The text that displays on the availability view is made dynamic by using tags (click here to learn more about using tags) which merge values that are stored on the appointment into text that displays. The default description that is added on the calendar event is "%APPT_START_TIME_STAFF% - %APPT_END_TIME_STAFF% %REASON% %CLIENT_FULLNAME%" which would fill in with the respective values (i.e. the tag %CLIENT_FULLNAME% would fill in with the name of the client).
Since that is the default description, then if I as a staff member have the service "Consultation" scheduled with my client "Jane Doe" between 11am - 1pm, the event that shows on my availability view would have the description "11:00 AM - 01:00 PM Consultation Jane Doe", as shown below:
You may, however, care about different details around the appointment that you'd like to have displayed here. Maybe for you, you want to see the client's cell phone number in that view. By looking at the list of tag values, we can see that the tag we'd want to use is %CLIENT_MOBILE_PHONE%.
My next step is to add that tag to the calendar description. To do this I'll go to Appointments > Settings to find the "Availability View Description for Service Appointments" field:
I'm going to change the text that I have stored in there so that it includes that tag I'm interested in: %CLIENT_MOBILE_PHONE%
Since I've included that tag, then when I go back to look at the Availability view under Appointments > Availability, I'm going to see the client's phone number in the description:
Again, good documentation to familiarize yourself with on this front is how to use tags and what tags we have available. If you are trying to get your Availability view to display something specific and can't figure out how to do that, simply write our support team with the specifics of what you'd like it to show and we'd be happy to help you with that.