Setting up appointment requests

In Vetocare, you can let clients make appointments themselves via a public link, taking your own schedule into account. You can then approve appointment requests to turn them directly into appointments in your schedule. Appointment requests can be configured flexibly for many different purposes.

To use the appointment request feature, you must first configure it by following a number of steps. In the menu, go to “Settings” and open the “Appointment requests” page, which can be found under the “Schedule” heading. On this page, you can turn the appointment request functionality on or off; it is turned off by default.

Once appointment requests are enabled, there are a number of steps to complete. These steps only need to be configured once, but you can always change them later. The steps are as follows:

Step 1: Appointment types

Appointment types allow you to specify what kind of appointments you want to receive through appointment requests and configure different settings for each type. For example, you can create one type for consultations and another for home visits. When creating or editing appointment types, you can specify many different options, divided across several tabs:

Basic details

*Name*, where you can enter the name of this appointment type so that your clients can recognize it. For example, consultation, check-up, home visit, etc.
*Duration*, where you can specify how long an appointment will last in the schedule. This is also used to check where there is still availability in the schedule.
*Buffer (time/break after appointment)*, which allows you to specify how much time you want to keep free after the appointment, for example, for travel time or administration.
*Home visit*, where this option indicates that an address is required for this appointment type and that the client must enter an address in their details.
*Hide appointment duration*, where this option hides the appointment duration from the client. You might do this, for example, if appointment durations vary considerably and the client is ultimately charged per treatment rather than for the amount of time spent on it.
*Description for the client*, which allows you to enter an additional description that the client can read before choosing this appointment type.
*Choose default schedule*, which allows you to specify which schedule these appointments should be placed in by default if you have configured multiple schedules. When the appointment is approved, the correct schedule will then be selected automatically.

Time slots

Here you can configure how many days into the future appointments can be made and which time slot options the client can see. These options are as follows:

*The time slots are filled in automatically based on the appointment duration*. For example, this gives you times of 9:00, 9:20, 9:40, etc. if the total appointment duration is 20 minutes.
*The time slots only on full hours*. For example, 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, etc.
*The time slots only on full and half hours*. For example, 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, 10:30, etc.
*Allow the client to choose only a day and determine the time yourself*. This gives clients only the option to choose a day, with “All day” as the only available time option. When approving the request, you can then place the appointment at a time that suits you.
*Allow the client to choose only a day and part of a day, and determine the time yourself*. This uses all your available times as time options. For example, if you have created an availability slot from 9:00 to 12:30 and another from 13:00 to 16:00, these two time slots will be visible to the client as options.
*Choose your own interval*. This allows you to specify the interval between times in minutes or hours. For example, if you enter 45 minutes here, the time slots will be 9:00, 9:45, 10:30, etc.

Animal species

Here you can configure which animal species can be used for this appointment type. For example, you could allow dogs and cats for a check-up but not horses, or do the opposite for a home visit.

Step 2: Availability

In this step, you can specify when appointment requests should be available. You can specify this at a weekly level by selecting the days of the week, for example, but also for specific dates. You can also enter an end date, so that you can use different times until the new year, for example, and then continue with new times.

For each time slot you configure, you can specify additional options to limit it. These additional options are also used to determine whether a time is already fully booked. You can also allow times to overlap. For example, you can have a time slot for consultations that is available all day and a time slot for check-ups that is available only in the afternoon.

You can provide all of these additional options:

*Specify appointment types*. If you specify appointment types, this time slot is available only for those appointment types, and your schedule will only be checked for those appointment types to determine whether availability remains. For example, you can make a time slot available only for consultations.

*Number of appointments per time slot*. If you set the number of available appointments per time slot based on available users, all these users will be checked to determine whether they are not already scheduled during the available time slots. If you specify the number directly, the system will only check whether fewer than the specified number of appointments have been made within the selected time slot.

Step 3: Confirmation message

Here you can personalize the message the client receives when the appointment is approved. There is a default message you can use, but you can of course fully customize it here.

After completing the steps

Once all steps have been completed, a link will be created that can be copied. This is the link you can send to your clients or, for example, place on your own website so that appointment requests can be made. You can also open it yourself to check that everything has been configured as expected.

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