Offer my client an appointment

Finding a Tuesday costs six messages. You offer two dates, your client answers two days later that neither works, you offer three more, and the job still has not started.

An appointment on an order replaces that exchange with a link. You say when you accept being booked, your client picks, and the slot is taken the moment they click.

You need the Handle appointments permission. It is free on every plan.

First, when you accept being booked

Studio settings → Appointments. Seven fields, filled in once.

• Working days. Monday to Friday by default.
• From and to, your hours of the day.
• Length of a slot, in minutes. This is the step of your grid: with 60, people book you at 9, at 10, at 11, never at 9.30. Between 15 minutes and 8 hours.
• Minimum notice before an appointment, in hours. 24 by default, which means "not tomorrow morning". Zero allows the next hour.
• Bookable up to, in days. 30 by default. Beyond that your client sees nothing, which is what keeps an appointment out of February.
• Do not offer anything before, optional. A holiday, or a week already full.

A combination that would never leave a single slot is refused with the reason written out, rather than showing you an empty calendar with no explanation. A 48-hour notice inside a one-day window, for instance.

Putting an appointment on a job

On the order, Appointments tab, Offer an appointment button. Three fields:

• Name of the appointment. "Kick-off call", "Shoot", "Site visit". Your client reads it.
• Note for the client, optional. What they need to know or bring.
• Length, in minutes. A multiple of your slot, otherwise a bookable gap would be left in the middle of the appointment.

The length is frozen at that moment. If you later move your slots from 60 to 90 minutes, this one keeps 60. Nobody lengthens an appointment already written in somebody's calendar.

You can put several on the same job: the kick-off call, then the shoot.

What your client does

They get an e-mail in your name, with no account to create, leading to the tracking link they already have. On their page they see the days with at least one free slot, then that day's hours, as large buttons. One thing at a time.

Their click books it, immediately. Nothing waits to be submitted, and two clients cannot take the same slot: if somebody took it between the page loading and the click, the page says so and asks them to pick another.

After that they can change slot or say "I can no longer come", for as long as your minimum notice has not been reached. Past it the button stays visible and tells them to write to you: it is not a feature they lost, it is a reason to talk to you.

What reaches everybody's calendar

Both sides, because an appointment only Kalepio knows about is an appointment somebody misses.

• Your client gets an "Add to my calendar" button on their page, and the file is attached to the reminder they receive the day before.
• You get the file with the e-mail announcing the slot was taken. And on the order itself, every booked appointment carries the same button, which covers the case where you took the booking on the telephone yourself.

The file moves on its own if the appointment moves: your calendar changes the event's hour rather than growing a second one.

The reminder the day before

Automatic, once, the day before. It goes out in your studio's name and says nothing internal: no order number, no status, not your note.

A client whose record carries no address gets nothing, and nothing fails because of it.

Finding your appointments

On your dashboard, an "Upcoming appointments" block with the next five, across every job. That is where you look in the morning, rather than opening each job to find out whether one carries a slot.

And an unbooked appointment counts as something your client owes you: the reminder knows how to say so, beside an unanswered brief or a payment still waiting.

Cancelling

The Cancel the appointment button sits on the appointment's own row. It is never limited by the notice you set for your client: you cancel whenever you want, including an hour beforehand.

A cancelled appointment frees its slot for somebody else.

What this is not

Not a calendar. You do not manage your time here, you declare when you accept being booked. Concretely, four things do not exist:

• no synchronisation with Google Calendar or Outlook. Kalepio only knows about Kalepio appointments, so a slot taken elsewhere is not blocked here. That is what "Do not offer anything before" is for, and it is the limit to know before relying on this every day;
• no availability per person in a studio of several: the week declared is the studio's;
• no calendar of exceptions: one date to start again from, not "closed Tuesday afternoons";
• no appointment without a job. An appointment lives on an order, so the discovery call with a prospect who has ordered nothing has no home here.