It's possible in Vetocare to allow your clients to request appointments via a public link, which takes your own calendar into consideration. You can then approve these appointments to add them to your own calendar directly. Appointment requests can be configured for many different use cases.

To use appointment requests, you first have to configure it via a couple steps. To do this, navigate via the menu to “Settings” and open the page “Configure appointment requests”, found under the “Calendar” panel. On this page you will have the option of enabling and disabling the appointment requests, which is off by default.

When you have turned on appointment requests, you will have a few steps to go through. These steps must be configured at least once, but can always be changed again in the future. The steps are as follows:

 

Step 1: Appointment types

With appointment types you can specify which kind of appointments you'd like to receive through your appointment requests. For example, you could have a type for consults and a type for house visits. When adding or modifying a type, you can specify many different settings, split into different tabs:

Basic info

  • Name, here you can specify the name of the type, so your clients will know what to select. For example, consult, check-up, house visit, etc.
  • Duration, here you can specify how long the appointment will take. This will also be used for your calendar, to check where you'll have time available.
  • Buffer (time/break after appointment), with this you can specify how much time you want to keep available after an appointment so you can take things such as travel time or administration into account.
  • Home visit, with this option you'll specify that you need an address along with the rest of the information from your clients.
  • Hide duration, if you use this option, you'll hide the duration of the appointment from your client. For example, if the duration of your appointments vary by a lot and you charge the client per treatment and not for the duration, you can enable this to cause less confusion or complaints.
  • Add an explanation, with this option you can add an explanation which your clients can read before selecting this appointment type.
  • Default calendar, in case you use multiple calendars, you can specify which calendar you want to place this type of appointment on so that when you'll confirm your appointment, it will by default be placed in the proper calendar.

 

Time slots

Here you can specify how many days in advance and in the future your appointments can be created, and which time slots your client will see. These have the following options:

  • The time slots will be decided automatically based on the length of the appointment. With this you'll get time slots of 9:00, 9:20, 9:40, etc. in case you'll have an appointment with a duration of 20 minutes.
  • Only put time slots on the whole hours. For example 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, etc.
  • Only put time slots on the full hour and half hour.. For example 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, 10:30, etc.
  • Only specify a date, you can choose the times yourself. With this, you'll give the clients the option to specify a date, with the only option for the time slots being All day. When you confirm this appointment request, you can plan it yourself at a time that suits you.
  • Only specify a date and daypart, you can choose the times yourself. With this option you'll make all your available times available as time slots. If you have your availability configured so you'll have a rule for 9:00 to 12:30, and a rule for 13:00 to 16:00, you'll have these 2 options available for your client as time slots.
  • Specify your own interval. Here you can specify your own interval for minutes or hours. For example, if you fill in 45 minutes, you'll have time slots of 9:00, 9:45, 10:30, etc. starting at the first available moment.

Animal types

Here you can specify which types of animals can be used for this appointment type. For example, you can make a check-up available for cats and dogs, but not for horses, and a house visit the other way around.

 

Step 2: Availability

With this step you'll specify when your appointment requests should be available. You could do this per week by specifying the days of the week, but also for specific dates. You can also specify an end date, so you can make a rule only available until for example new years, so you can specify new rules for after the new years.

For every rule you create, you can specify some options to limit these. These options will be used to check if a time slot is already filled or not. You can also overlap times, for example to create a rule for consults for the whole day, and a rule for check-ups that are only available in the afternoon.

These are the extra options you can specify:

  • Specify request types. If you specify appointment types, these time slots will only be available for the specified appointment types. For example, you could create time slots that are only available for consults.
  • Amount of appointments per timeslot. If you specify the amount of appointments based on users, all users will be checked in your calendar to see if they're already assigned at the time or not. If you specify an amount directly, it will only check if there's already x amount of appointments at the time.

 

Step 3: Confirmation message

Here you can personalise the message that the client will receive when an appointment has been approved. There is a default template that you can use, but you can modify it completely to your liking.

 

After the steps

As soon as all steps have been completed, a link will be created that can be copied. This is the link that you can sent to your clients to have them request their appointments, or for example to place on your own website. Optionally you can open this link yourself to ensure everything you've configured is as desired.