Add appointments to the Scheduler

The RealtimeCRM Scheduler enables you and others on your team to book appointments and eliminate double bookings. Its intuitive drag and drop scheduling allows you to save time and become more efficient helping you focus on what’s most important to you, your customers. So whether you have a team of engineers or tutors they’ll always know who they’re seeing next.

It doesn’t matter whether most of your team are working remote or at the office, as RealtimeCRM is cloud based as long as you have an internet connection you’ll always have the most up to date information.

The Scheduler Options

The Scheduler options button allows you to customise your scheduler including setting the start time and end time for your daily appointments as well as the default time blocks for each appointment.

On the left hand side bar click the ‘Scheduler’ panel
Then click Options
A drop-down menu should appear allowing you to change the default slot duration i.e. if your appointments usually run in 30 minute intervals you can change the Scheduler to reflect this.
You can also set when your first appointments for the day start and when the last appointment ends, thus restricting the Scheduler only to those times when appointments can actually take place, furthermore you can select whether to include weekends or not as well as which day of the week is your first day depending on your needs
Once you’re happy with the changes you’ve made simply click outside the drop-down menu to save those changes

The Scheduler toggle buttons

On either side of the Options button you’ll notice other buttons such as Day and Week, this allows you to change the date range you can view in the Scheduler from just appointments for a single day to all appointments for a given week.

The Today button automatically takes you to all appointments for today’s date and the arrows next to it allow you to either toggle through the previous or following days or months.

Your appointment status

These are pretty self explanatory but we’ll go through them anyway.

Not Started: This appointment has not yet begun
En Route: The relevant member of staff is travelling to the appointment location
Started: The appointment is currently underway
Cancelled: This appointment is no longer taking place
Completed: This appointment has taken place and now ended
Not Available: This member of staff is not available for any appointments during this time

These are just the statuses that come out the box, but with RealtimeCRM you can change the statuses to best represent your workflow, you can even change the colour of each status to suit your own taste.

Tip: We recommend changing your appointment statuses to whatever suits you best before adding any appointments to the Scheduler.

So how do I change the appointment statuses?

Click on your username on the top right corner of the screen
A drop-down menu should appear and you should select ‘Settings’.
Now click on the ‘Configuration’ panel
Once on the Configuration page scroll down until you reach the “Appointments Statuses” heading
You should then see all your appointment statuses as in the example below

To move an appointment status up or down your workflow click the symbol and drag the appointment status up or down to its new position and then let go to save the change
To change either the colour or name of an appointment status click the Edit button next to the status you wish to change and then click the save button to keep the changes
If you want to delete a status you can only do so if it not currently in use in the Scheduler i.e. if you wanted to delete the status ‘Started’ but a bunch of appointments in the Scheduler are currently sitting in the ‘Started’ Status
That being taken into account simply click the Delete button next to the status you wish to remove. A warning box should appear if you wish to proceed then click ‘OK’ and the status will be removed from the Scheduler.

Add an appointment

We’ve made the process of adding appointments as quick and intuitive as possible, it’s simply a matter of dragging and dropping appointments into place.

On the left hand side bar click the ‘Scheduler’ panel
Now find either your name or the member of staff for whom you are making an appointment and simply click under the time you wish for the appointment to begin.
Alternatively you can click under the time you wish the appointment to begin and then drag to the end time this will then set the start time and end time automatically for you
Once you have done the above a dialog box will open where you can fill in the details of the appointment and set its status via a drop-down menu
Once you are happy with the details simply click the Add button and the appointment will now be saved to the system ready to be viewed by the relevant member of staff

Change the status of an existing appointment

To change the status of an existing booking simply click on it and in the dialog box that appears click the drop-down menu next to ‘Status’ and select the appropriate option, in this case we will change the status of an existing booking from ‘Not Started’ to ‘Started’, once you’ve changed the booking status simply click the blue ‘Update’ button to save this change.

Move an existing appointment

RealtimeCRM allows you to move an existing appointment to another time on the same day without having to fill in its details again by simply dragging and dropping the relevant appointment to its new time, once you’ve dropped it to its new time this change will be saved automatically.