When setting up online booking, you have a few options on what gets displayed online and how it is displayed.
Choosing Whether to Have Online Booking at All!
To view the overall online booking settings for the location, you’ll want to head over to the Settings tab. From there, click on Locations in the left sidebar menu and Edit to the right of the location you’ll be updating:
Scroll down to the bottom of the page to the Online Booking section and toggle on Location Available to be Booked Online:
Make sure to hit the blue Save button to confirm those changes and you’re all set!
Choosing clinic-wide display settings
If you’ve decided to have online booking available for your practice, you may want to set some other clinic-wide details regarding what type of information you’d like to display for patients when they’re booking online.
All of this will be found under Settings > Online Booking > Display Preferences:
From here, you can tell Jane if you’d like only your treatments and/or your staff members are seen as Bookable online. As a default, Jane ensures that patients have the option to be able to book under both, but feel free to change this as you see fit!
You can also choose to display your clinic Phone Number & Email Address on your online booking page. If you choose to do so, this will be found at the bottom of your online booking page:
Pro-tip💡: If you need to update the phone number or email that appears on the online booking site, you can update this information within the location settings. A Full Access user can head over to the Settings tab and Locations within the left sidebar menu. Next, they’ll want to click on Edit to the right of the location and update the Contact Info fields.
⚠️ If you choose to disable having your clinic phone number and/or clinic email from displaying on your Online Booking page, this will also ensure that that information is not displayed on receipts and other financial documents.
This area is also where you’re also able to display your clinics Time Zone for patients, in case your patients may be booking from outside your clinic’s physical location & timezone.
Check out our guide on Working with Patients Across Time Zones for more details on this.
There are also other clinic-wide settings to explore, including the ability to limit the number of appointments that patients can book. Full Access staff members can restrict the maximum number of upcoming appointments patients can book by heading to Settings > Online Booking, scrolling to the Booking, Cancelling, & Relationships section, and then setting the Upcoming appointments limit.
Choosing Whether Staff Show Up
You also have the option of choosing which staff are added to the online booking site through their individual staff settings. This is a great option for clinics that have some staff that offer online booking and some that don’t.
To view and update the online booking for a specific staff member, head over to the Staff tab and click on their name to open up their Staff Profile. From there, click on the Edit/Settings tab and then on the Online Booking tab. Uncheck Enable Online Booking and that staff member will not be displayed at all online.
If the staff member works are multiple locations or has recently joined the clinic, you’ll want to check the following to ensure they’re displayed correctly:
- The staff member is opted into that location under their Staff Profile > Edit/Settings > Locations
- The treatments offered at that location are set to Display in Online Booking over in the Settings tab > Treatments, Classes & Group Appointments
- The staff member’s shifts are set to Bookable Online
Choosing Whether Shifts Show Up
You might also only want certain shifts or certain parts of a shift to show up online. You can set each shift to have its own behaviour with online booking.
Here’s more information on Adding Staff Shifts.
Once you’ve added a shift you can use the Booking Options to choose whether that shift shows up online or not or requires your patient to Contact you to Book, pending your approval.
If you want only part of your day to show up online, you can choose to build a shift with multiple “mini-shifts” and then have them behave differently. For example, setting shifts up on the way to the left will show availability on the right.
Contact to Book
Jane’s Contact to Book setting lets you show your availability online, but prompts patients to call you to schedule their appointment so you can approve the time.
You can also make your shifts show up online but still request that people Contact to Book.
The Contact to Book button will show up like this - with availability displaying but instructing the client to call or email your clinic to reserve a time.
Treatments as Call to Book
Finally, if you want your shifts to be available but have certain treatments that you’d like to approve before they get booked, you can set just that treatment option to Contact to Book.
This setting is found in the Settings > Treatments area.
I hope this makes your online booking setup a little more unique to the way you like things.
And since we’re on the topic, feel free to check out some other tips on Setting up your Online Booking like a Boss.
Individual Staff Preferences
There are a few special ways you can have online booking offered per staff member. These settings are found in their Staff Profiles under their Edit/Settings > Online Booking.
Online Rolling Availability: Choose how far in the future to open up your schedule. Set this to 3 months and Jane will open up booking for 3 months into the future and just keep rolling along one day at a time. This allows you the buffer you might need to add in holidays, time off or personal appointments before someone books appointments for the entire year!
Online Booking Start Time: The default here is “sequentially” which means that Jane will offer your appointments back to back based on their length. If you have a 60-minute treatment, Jane will offer it every 60 minutes. If you have a 90-minute treatment, that one will be offered every 90 minutes. (1pm, 2:30pm, 4pm).
If you offer long treatments this can mean that start times are pretty far apart, even if your day is completely open. To avoid this you can choose to have treatments offered on more regular intervals. If you choose 30 minutes here, for example, a 90-minute appointment will be offered every 30 minutes (1 pm, 1:30 pm, 2 pm).
I like the “based on my shortest treatment” option, as this means that spaces left in your day would always be a size that could fit whatever your shortest treatment option is.
Cluster Online Booking: If you have a really flexible schedule with lots of openings, but you’d like clients to only book around existing appointments, you can use this setting so that Jane will offer appointments just before or after whatever is booked on your schedule. Please note that breaks work a bit differently with cluster booking. A break divides your shift so you’ll effectively have two separate shifts where Jane clusters independently. If there are no appointments in the schedule, availability will be offerred on both sides of the shift. Once there is an appointment in say the first part of the shift, Jane will offer up times around that appointment and at all times in the second part of the shift because no appointments are shown there.
Make Me Look Busy: This one is a little bit cheeky. Often when you’re brand new to practicing, or to a clinic, or to a city you might not yet have a full caseload. People are a bit wary of booking on a fully open schedule, so Jane can limit the number of appointments that are displayed per day. Even if you are completely empty, Jane can display just 3, or 4, or 2 spots to make it look a little busier. ;)
Allow Post-Treatment Time after Shift Ends: Some treatments have a longer scheduled time than the treatment duration (often to allow for a room to be re-set or time to do your clinical notes etc). When your shift ends at 5 pm, it might be reasonable for that extra buffer time to extend into the time after your shift ends. If you have a 60-minute appointment with a 15-minute buffer (so normally that blocks of 75 minutes on your schedule), it might make sense for Jane to allow a 4 pm appointment, even though there are only 60 minutes left on the shift).
Stagger Online Booking: This one is only relevant if you are offering multiple appointments in multiple rooms at the same time for the same staff member. If this is the case you might find this guide document on Staggering Booking helpful.
Online Booking Start Time: Same Day Booking Exception
Depending on what you have set for the ‘Do Not Allow Booking Within’ time in Settings> Online Booking, same-day appointments may ignore the Online Booking Start time setting based on the time the patient is booking. When you have a ‘Do Not Allow Booking Within’ time selected, it dictates the earliest possible time an appointment can be booked from the present moment, effectively creating a new shift start time. Let’s go over an example to see this in action with the following rules:
- The ‘Do not allow booking within’ time is 3 hours
- The practitioner works 9AM-6PM and only offers 30 minute sessions
- The practitioner also has their online booking start times set to start on the 30 minutes
Say our patient logs on at 2:13PM to look for an appointment. If they are looking at any dates in the future, they’ll see openings on the hour and half hour, so 9AM, 9:30AM, 10AM, etc. If they are looking to book for the same day, the first time offered will be the earliest spot 3 hours from the current time, rounded up to the nearest grid line. In this case, it would be 2:13PM plus 3 hours, taking us to 5:13PM, which Jane would round up to 5:15PM, 5:45PM, 6:15PM etc. This means that same-day appointments can allow patients to book at potentially unexpected times, as Jane is using the current time on a rolling basis which will change depending on when the patient accesses the online booking site. Jane is simply trying to offer as much availability as possible.
Down the Rabbit’s Hole of Managing Online Booking
Depending on the nuances of your schedule, you may want to use Tags to manage the availability of rooms or equipment necessary for your treatments.
Using some of these advanced features in Jane can be pretty tricky and you want to be sure to get it right before your Online Booking site in Jane “goes live.” We don’t want you to miss the opportunity to accept a new client or see a returning one, so it’s best to talk it over with a Jane Support Team Member.
Be sure to contact us to let us know how we can help! :)