Appointments and booking

Appointments are meetings, calls or visits with a contact at a set time. Each one keeps its own time zone, warns you when the same person is already busy, and reminds the person assigned shortly before it starts. With the booking page, customers can also choose a free time themselves from a public link.

Before you start

• Appointments are part of every plan. The public booking page is available when your plan includes Booking page.
• Every appointment belongs to a contact, and may also be linked to one of that contact's deals.

Add an appointment

1. Open the contact, or one of their deals.
2. In the Tasks · Appointments section of a contact, or the Tasks section of a deal, select Add appointment.
3. Fill in the form and select Save.

The appointment keeps its time zone: everyone sees it at the same local time, written with its zone, wherever they are.

You cannot add an appointment to an archived contact. Restore the contact first.

When the person is already busy

If the person assigned already has a scheduled appointment that overlaps, the form stops and shows This person already has an appointment at that time, with up to five of the overlapping appointments. Change the time or the person, or tick Keep both appointments and save again.

The check runs only when an appointment has someone assigned, and on an edit only when its time or its person changes. Some teams book overlapping visits on purpose, so this is a warning, not a block.

See and manage appointments

1. In the sidebar, select Appointments.
2. Choose a Status and tick Assigned to me if you want only yours.
3. Select Apply.

Each row shows the start time and zone, the duration, the contact, the person assigned and the location. 25 appointments fit on a page.

• Scheduled shows upcoming appointments, soonest first, including those that ended within the last day.
• Completed, Cancelled and No-show show the most recent first.

To change an appointment, select its title. Only scheduled appointments can be edited. On the same page, change its status with Mark completed, Cancel appointment, Mark no-show or Back to scheduled. Each appointment keeps a History of these changes.

About an hour before a scheduled appointment, the person assigned gets an Appointment soon notification, and an email too unless they turned email reminders off. See Tasks and Today.

Set up the booking page

Available when your plan includes Booking page. Owners and admins only.

1. In the sidebar click Team, then Booking page at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the fields below.
3. Tick Publish the booking page and select Save.

Once published, the page's public address appears under Publish the booking page. Share it on your website, in your messages or on social media. To stop bookings, untick Publish the booking page and save: the link then stops working.

What customers see

The booking page shows your company name and What is being booked. The customer:

1. Chooses a Time from the free slots.
2. Enters Your name, and an Email or a Phone. At least one of the two is required. A phone number has 6 to 15 digits and may start with +.
3. Selects Book this time.

The page offers slots for the next 14 days, only in the future, and never at a time when the assigned person already has a scheduled appointment. It lists up to 200 slots. If no slot is free, it says No times are available right now.

What a booking creates

Each booking creates:

• A new contact with the name, email and phone given, the status Lead and the source Website, owned by the assigned person. The contact is opted out of marketing, because booking a time is not consent to marketing messages.
• A scheduled appointment for that contact, titled with What is being booked, assigned to the assigned person, in the page's time zone.
• A notification to the assigned person.

Anyone can type any name or email on a public page, so a booking never joins an existing contact, even with the same email. Check Possible duplicates from time to time and merge them. See Import and duplicates.

Limits

• One network address can book up to 5 times an hour. After that the page says Too many bookings from this address. Try again later.
• Two customers cannot take the same slot: the second one sees This time is no longer available.
• The booking page has one set of hours and one assigned person per company.
• The booking page does not take payments and does not send confirmation emails to the customer. The page itself confirms the booking.

Troubleshooting

• "Choose a contact for this appointment": appointments are always added from a contact or a deal.
• "Move this appointment back to scheduled before changing it": select Back to scheduled first.
• "Enter a valid date and time": check the date, the time and the time zone.
• The booking link shows nothing: check that Publish the booking page is ticked and saved, and that your plan still includes Booking page.
• Customers see fewer slots than expected: slots that overlap the assigned person's scheduled appointments are hidden, and slots that do not fit fully before To hour are left out.