Documentation / Guides

Booking and managing appointments

This guide covers the day-to-day mechanics of the calendar: how availability is calculated, how to book against a resource or chair, how reminders go out, how to block time that isn't a patient appointment, and how to see your appointments in your own calendar app.

Book an appointment

From the calendar, select a time or choose a new appointment, then pick the patient, the service and the chair. Choosing a service sets the end time from its duration. If the practice has more than one chair, the booking must name one. On save, HyperCRM refuses the booking if it overlaps a confirmed or pending booking or blocked time on the same chair, another booking for the same person, or time the whole practice has blocked. The dialog stays open so you can pick another time, chair or person. Staff bookings are not limited to opening hours or to the calendar slot interval.

Filter the calendar

The buttons under the dates filter the calendar. Practitioner shows one person's day, or the bookings still waiting for a practitioner. A practice with two or more chairs gets a chair filter, and one with two or more locations a Location filter, which also narrows the chair filter to that location's chairs. In the Day view a chair or location filter shows only those columns. Clear filters turns them all off, and the filters are part of the page's address, so a filtered calendar can be bookmarked or shared.

A new appointment made on a filtered calendar starts with the filters filled in: the chair and the practitioner you are looking at, and with a location picked, that location (its first chair is chosen, and the location is named under the chair; pick another chair to change it).

Book a course of appointments

On a new appointment, switch on Repeat this appointment. Choose Repeat every 1, 2, 3, 4 or 6 weeks, and add days under Also on these days if a course runs more than once a week. Under Until, choose a number of sessions, from 2 to 52 counting this one, or a last date.

The dates you would get lists every date the rule reaches and marks any that are already taken. It waits until the booking has a chair, because a course is booked into the same chair each week. On save, taken dates are skipped and you are told which ones, so you can arrange those separately. The patient gets one email listing every session, with one calendar invitation covering them all.

Each session is its own booking afterwards. Moving, cancelling or deleting one changes only that one, and the rest of the course stays as it is.

Answer booking requests

A booking made on your website arrives as a request. A phone assistant booking does too, unless the line is set to book confirmed. A request holds its time until you answer it, so the same slot is never offered to someone else while it waits.

It appears under Booking requests on the calendar, with Confirm and Decline. Confirming emails the patient a confirmation with a calendar invite. Declining frees the time at once and emails the patient. If nobody has checked the details the patient gave, neither the decline nor the expiry email is sent: the practice would be writing to an address nobody there has looked at. A patient the phone assistant created gets no email of any kind until someone saves their record, and emails missed while it was held are not sent later.

In Settings → General, Scheduling, Unanswered requests expire frees a request nobody answered after the set number of opening hours (2 by default), never later than the appointment itself. The patient is emailed to ask for another time unless their details are still unchecked, and each owner is notified either way.

To stop fake bookings filling the diary, the website accepts at most 8 new open requests an hour, 25 open at once, and 3 from one email address or phone number.

How free times are worked out

A free time is what is left of the opening hours once closed days and holidays, bookings and blocked time are taken out. The assistant looks at every chair. The public booking page and the phone assistant (Complete plan, on request) offer only chairs and services marked public, and only practitioners who are published. Otherwise they all use the same rules:

• Opening hours and closed days. A day marked closed has no free times at all.
• The calendar slot interval. Start times go up by the Calendar slot interval (Settings → General, Scheduling), counting from opening time.
• The booking length. This is the service's duration, or the default length if no service is chosen. The whole booking has to end by closing time.
• What is already busy: bookings and blocked time. Bookings that are confirmed or waiting for approval, and blocked time. Reminders never block a time.
• Times already gone. Today, a time that has passed is not offered.

What counts as busy depends on what you asked about:

• A chair: that chair's bookings and blocked time.
• A person, such as a dentist: that person's bookings and blocked time on any chair. A chair must be free too.
• Neither: every chair is checked, and each free time shows the chairs it is free on.

Blocked time only counts against a person when it says who is away. When you block time, fill in Who is away so that person is not offered elsewhere.

Blocked time with no chair and nobody named, such as a holiday, closes the whole practice. No chair and no person is offered during it.

You can also ask the assistant about one exact time. It tells you if that time is free, or why not: already taken, already past, a closed day, or outside opening hours. When it answers for the morning, afternoon or evening, morning is before 12:00, afternoon is 12:00 to 17:00, and evening is from 17:00.

If a time you expect is missing, check

• the opening hours for that day;
• whether that day is marked closed;
• blocked time for that person, such as time off;
• blocked time for the whole practice, such as a holiday;
• another booking for the same person on a different chair;
• whether the service is too long to finish before closing time.

Reschedule, delete or cancel

An existing appointment can be moved to another time, chair or person by editing it or dragging it on the calendar. A move is checked for overlaps the same way a new booking is, so it cannot land on another booking on the same chair, the same person's booking elsewhere, or a practice-wide block.

Cancel appointment calls off a confirmed appointment without erasing it: the time is freed, the patient gets a cancelled invite, and it is kept as cancelled. Delete removes an appointment permanently, for one entered by mistake. When the time moves, or the appointment is cancelled or deleted, the patient is emailed an updated or cancelled calendar invite.

Block time that isn't a booking

Alongside appointments, the calendar supports blocked time (for time off, admin work or a lunch break) and reminder events. Blocked time keeps its chair free of bookings, and when it says who is away, that person is not offered on any chair either. With no chair and nobody named, it blocks the whole practice. A reminder is only a note on the calendar and never blocks a time.

Reminders and notes

A confirmed appointment with a patient gets a reminder ahead of time, by email, text message (SMS) or both. The owner sets the Appointment reminder lead time (15 minutes to 2 days, 1 day by default) and Send reminders by in Settings → General, Scheduling. A reminder goes only on a channel the practice has switched on, and only if the patient has agreed to email or SMS on their record. Both are off for a new patient. Text messages use credits. Reminders carry no calendar invite: the invite comes with the booking emails instead, when staff book, when an online request is confirmed, when the time moves, and when it is cancelled or deleted. Each appointment also has its own notes field, in the appointment on the calendar.

See your appointments in your own calendar

Each practitioner can send their own appointments to the calendar app they already use. Each person sets it up for themselves, in Settings → Calendar sync. The owner can see who has connected in Settings → Team, but cannot connect anyone else. You can use Google, a calendar link, or both. It is included on every plan.

It works one way. HyperCRM adds and updates your appointments in your calendar, but never reads it, so your own events do not block times in HyperCRM.

Google Calendar

Choose Connect Google Calendar and sign in to your Google account. HyperCRM adds a separate calendar named after your practice. It can see and change that calendar only, never your own. Your appointments appear within a few minutes, and later changes follow within minutes too.

To stop, choose Disconnect. HyperCRM removes its calendar from your Google account, and your own events stay as they are. If you had already removed HyperCRM's access in Google, delete the calendar there yourself. To switch to another Google account, disconnect first, then connect again.

Apple Calendar, Outlook and other apps

Under Calendar link, choose Create link. HyperCRM shows your private link once, so save it then. On an iPhone, iPad or Mac, Add to Apple Calendar subscribes in one step. Anywhere else, copy the link and add it:

• Apple Calendar on a Mac: File, then New Calendar Subscription
• Outlook: Add calendar, then Subscribe from web
• Google Calendar on a computer: next to Other calendars, choose +, then From URL

Your calendar app checks the link for changes on its own schedule. Apple Calendar can check every few minutes and Outlook every few hours. Google can take up to a day. The link holds your appointments from the last 30 days to six months ahead.

Anyone who has the link can see your appointments, so do not share it. If someone else may have seen it, choose Get a new link: the old one stops working. Turn off stops the link, and your calendar app shows it empty the next time it checks.

What each event shows

• Shown: the patient's name, the service, the time, the chair or room, and a link that opens the appointment in HyperCRM after you sign in
• Never sent: notes, phone numbers, email addresses or anything from the clinical record
• Your blocked time shows as Unavailable. A booking still waiting for approval shows as tentative, titled Booking request with the service and no patient name until you confirm it. An appointment that is cancelled, declined or expired is removed
• Only appointments assigned to you are sent, so a colleague's diary never appears in your calendar

If you erase a patient, their name is removed from these events too. In Google it goes within minutes, or once you reconnect if Google asks you to. Through a calendar link it goes the next time your app checks. Copies the calendar company keeps itself, such as event history or notification emails, are outside our control.