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Troubleshooting Tips for Subscribed Calendars

If you’ve landed on this guide it sounds like you might be having troubles with your Subscribed Calendar from Jane.

You might have such questions like:

“I changed my appointment but that’s not being reflected in my Google Calendar”

“My iCalendar was showing all my appointments but suddenly today I noticed some are missing”

“My cancelled appointment is still showing in my calendar after I cancelled it in Jane”

If so, this guide is the first place to start troubleshooting your Jane subscribed calendar.

What is a Subscribed Calendar?

A subscribed calendar is a way for you to have your Jane appointments show up automatically in a local calendar. This might be with Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar or iCalendar (for Apple devices) and is an awesome tool for seeing everything that’s going on in your life in one place.

Once you’ve made that connection between Jane and your calendar, we continuously push out information about new, cancelled, deleted or updated appointments to that local calendar.

At this time Jane will continuously send updates to your local calendar about all upcoming appointments and those in the past 30 days.

How do I subscribe to my calendar?

We have some wonderful guides ready to go to help both staff and patients subscribe to their calendars:

Subscribing to Your Calendar for Staff

Subscribing to your Calendar for Patients

What’s Jane’s role in Subscribed Calendars?

When it comes to a Subscribed Calendar Jane only controls one piece of a much bigger puzzle. Jane’s role is to continuously ‘push’ out information about your appointments to the local calendar you use. We are then relying on a steady internet connection and your local calendar to pick up on this information and also to display it correctly.

If you’ve ever played the game of Telephone, you know how much a message can be distorted as it’s passed through different players!

Calendar Subscriptions are a little like that. Jane sends the message loud and clear, but it has to pass through a few players before it lands in your local calendar. Along the way things can become muddled and then you sometimes get the wrong message display at the other end. There are also settings on your local calendar that may impact how Jane’s appointment information comes through, such as how frequently the calendar is looking for Jane’s updates.

Why would my calendar subscription not be working correctly?

Calendar subscriptions are a way that Jane can send information to your local calendar app. Once the information is sent, Jane is no longer in control. There are a variety of things that can get mixed up. Some of the most common we’ve seen include:

  • The calendar program does not refresh the subscription often enough. Many of the most commonly used programs refresh once roughly every 24 hours. This includes Google Calendar, but other applications like iCalendar allow you to change this to every 15 minutes.
  • The URL for the subscription was copied and pasted wrong or an unknown error has occurred with the URL link.
  • The calendar just isn’t picking up the information Jane is sending. We see this from time to time immediately after software updates on your device.
  • The local calendars definition of an ‘update’ is different to ours. This is often what happens when your appointment time/ date changes and you don’t see this updated in your local calendar. Many of these applications only update when they “see” a change and sometimes they don’t pick up on these very well
  • Whether your calendar is subscribed directly on your device or being synced across something like iCloud. Syncing across a service like iCloud adds another layer to the message Jane’s information goes through and can cause delays or miscommunication.

We still have many users with Subscribed Calendars who don’t experience the above, but these are the ones we’ve seen come up in the past.

What can I do if my Subscribed Calendar isn’t working?

The rest of this guide touches on troubleshooting tips for Subscribed Calendars. Keep in mind that we are always checking that Jane is doing the job of pushing out the details of your appointments first, so these tips and tricks are based on our experiences and are not within the scope of Jane itself.

Remove the Subscription and add again

The first step to any troubleshooting with Calendar Subscriptions is to completely remove the subscription and start again from scratch. It’s like the software equivalent of turning it off and then back on again and often does the trick.

Below are steps for removing and resubscribing for different calendar applications

Google Calendar

First, open up your Google Calendar on your laptop or computer. **On the left-hand side of the calendar, you should be able to see a list of calendar subscriptions. Remove any clinic subscriptions by clicking the X:

In the popup window, click Remove Calendar

You can now follow the steps here for Subscribing to your Calendar again:

Subscribing to your Calendar for Staff

Subscribing to your Calendar for Patients

If you’re noticing that there is a delay in updates on your Google Calendar they unfortunately have a limitation to only check calendar subscriptions roughly once per day; Jane is constantly publishing the updated details, but since Google Calendar is only looking for these updates infrequently you may notice a delay in changes displaying on your calendar.

Apple iCalendar (on a Mac):

Within the Calendar app on a Macbook, open the default calendar application and right-click (or Ctrl-click) on the subscription and choose the Unsubscribe option:

iCalendar (on an iPhone):

Go to Settings > Passwords & Accounts > Subscribed Calendars section of your iPhone.

Then tap on the calendar(s) that you want to remove, which should lead you to the screen where you remove them:

Once removed you can follow these steps again to Subscribe to your Calendar again:

Subscribing to your Calendar for Patients

Pro tip: If you are a staff member trying to resubscribe again, you’ll notice in your Staff Profile a clickable link to “Reset Private URLs”. Go ahead and click that first, then follow the regular steps to Subscribe to your Calendar.

After resubscribing give your calendar about 24 hours to catch up and display all your appointments.

If that doesn’t do the trick, we do have a more extensive troubleshooting guide for those using iCalendar:

A Deep Dive into Calendar Subscription Issues with iCalendar

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