A Location in your TimeTap account is the place where your appointments take place. It can be a physical location that your clients come to (like a school), it could be a virtual location (like Skype, a conference line, or FaceTime), or it could be a shifting location (like "Your home" and you go to the clients home to fulfill the appointment).
A staff person is assigned hours of availability at any given location during which clients can book service-based appointments. Staff people can be assigned hours at multiple locations, but if an appointment is booked with them at one location they are assigned hours at, then their availability at the other location is blocked off so that the staff person doesn't get double booked in the same time slot.
On this page we'll cover everything related to appointments, like how to add them, manage them and keep them organized with location groups.
You can set up a location for your business through the Locations tab. To learn how to make changes to an existing location, read our documentation on editing your location's details.
To add a new location, navigate to the Locations section under your Settings menu and click “Add New Location”. You’ll be taken to the Add New Location flow.
Once you’ve entered the Add New Location flow, you’ll be on the Name & Type screen where you can enter the name of the location and select whether it is a physical, virtual or variable location.
- A physical location, such as a school, that you'll be meeting your clients at (most of your locations will likely be physical, FYI).
- A virtual location represents any appointments that are held virtually (like over the phone, on Skype, Google Hangouts, etc.).
- A variable location is when your appointment(s) take place at an address that is provided by your clients at the time of booking.
Once you’re done entering the name & type, click “Continue”.
Once on the Contact Information screen, you can optionally enter:
- A phone number for your location: this phone number can be added to your email templates or to your appointment saved message using the tag %LOCATION_OFFICEPHONE%
- An email address for your location: this email address can be cc'd on your email templates by using the tag %LOCATION_EMAIL%
- An an address (for a physical or variable location) or description (for your virtual location): these will display to your clients underneath your location name on your scheduling flow. It can be included in your email templates with the tag %LOCATION_ADDRESS% or %LOCATION_DESCRIPTION% (these tags are interchangeable so if you use %LOCATION_ADDRESS% it will pull up whatever was entered in either the location address or description field for the location
- A different time zone for your location: If this location is in a different time zone than your business is set to in your account settings, you can indicate that here and staff availability & appointment times will take the location's time zone into account when scheduling
Once you’re done click “Continue”:
Once on the Details screen, you can optionally add directions to or for the location. The directions that you enter can also display on your appointment emails if you use the tag %LOCATION_DIRECTIONS%. They won’t, however, be visible to the client when he or she is booking an appointment. Once you’re ready click “Continue”:
In the Confirm New Location screen, you can review the information you’ve entered in the other screens and once you’re ready click “Submit”:
You’ll be taken back to the location you just made's profile:
Managing Locations
Sometimes you may have changes that you want to make to a location that already exists. For example, you may need to change specific details such as the phone number or email address. On the location's profile page you can edit details about a location, create and edit its custom booking site and add your availability to it. We'll be reviewing all 3.
Edit an Existing Location
Under the Locations tab, click the “View Details” button for the location that you wish to edit.
Once on the Location’s profile page, you will immediately be taken to the Overview tab, click on the “Edit” button to make changes to the location’s details.
I’ve added an address for that location. Once you’re done making changes, click “Save Changes”.
The changes will be reflected under the Location Details section of the location’s profile page, and you’re all set.
Custom Booking Sites
TimeTap allows you to create dedicated URLs for combinations of specific staff, locations, services, and classes called custom booking sites. These URLs are helpful if you want clients to book appointments for specific services, at specific locations with specific staff members. Most of the time you will presumably create a Custom Booking Site for a particular location to send to the location's team to distribute. That's what we'll be going through here.
We'll begin by going to Settings > Locations > View (for the one you'd like to create one for).
Click on the button that says 'Create Custom Booking Site'
You'll be given the following lines to complete the creation of your Custom Booking Site:
- Internal Name: That's where you can put what you'd like the Custom Booking Site to be known as internally (no participant will see that, so no pressure on what you name it).
- Webhandle: Here is where you create the actual URL (i.e. downtownappt.timetap.com). The first portion (downtownappt) you can customize. The second will be a dropdown with different possible endings for your URL (i.e. .timetap, .mybenefitsappt, etc.). Keep in mind that what you create here is the URL that participants will use to book, so you want to make it easy to access and remember.
- Publish Booking Site: If you want the URL you create to be accessible for participants to book, select the corresponding box. If not, your URL will remain private and not be an external booking tool.
Once you fill out this page, be sure to click 'save.'
You’ll be taken back to the profile of the Custom Booking Site you just created:
After you make the initial Custom Booking Site, it will always be on the location's profile - so you can easily have it for distribution. Remember that you find that by going to settings > locations > view > custom booking site.
Adding Availability to a Location
The second tab of your Location Profile is the "Location Availability" tab. This tab is the inverse of the Service Availability tab from Staff Profile. Whereas in the service availability tab from the staff profile, you are looking at the hours when a particular staff person is available at a given location, in the location's service availability tab you are looking at what hours a particular location has staff assigned to it.
Whatever Location Profile you are in at the time is the particular location whose service availability you are viewing. Your availability is really important in TimeTap because it determines when you can offer service-based appointments. Reading this documentation carefully should give you a good idea of how to setup your location's service availability to offer appointments at the times you want them.
If after reading through this documentation you have any questions about how your location's service availability is configured, please contact our support team to ask them.
When the location has no availability set up for taking appointments, the availability tab will look completely bare. In order to add a date range of availability, click the "Add New Date Range" button:
This will take you into the "Add Staff Availability" flow and will have the location from whom's profile you clicked through from pre-selected:
In this example, I'll be adding availability for a single day so I'll select the option that I'm adding "Availability for a date range" and hit "Continue":
Next, under "Adding Availability for Appointments on" I'll select the date I'm adding availability for - May 24th, 2019 and hit "Continue":
Under the "Working Hours" tab, I'll set up what hours I'm available on Friday. In this example, let's say that on Friday I am adding availability for this location from 9A - 2P, then hit "Continue":
On the Confirmation screen, make sure that the hours of availability look correct before pressing "Submit":
Once you press "Submit" you'll be taken back to the Staff's Availability tab where you'll see their new date range of availability setup:
If you want to learn more about how to read your availability once it has been added to your service availability tab, you can check out our documentation on understanding your service availability display. We also have a lot written on how you can edit staff availability for services, make changes to your date ranges, as well as remove it all together.
At this point, it's a good idea to quickly hit the "Preview Scheduler" button just to make sure that it your availability for clients trying to book looks proper during the date range you added. This helps to ensure you got everything entered correctly 