Scheduling an Appointment

Unless you forbid it, some customers will probably still call up to make appointments. In order to keep the schedule accurate and prevent double-booking, these will have to be entered into AppointmentPlease by someone from your office via the administration section. Fortunately, this is quick and easy.

After you log into your administration site, you'll land on the Home screen, which has a handy 7-day schedule, much like a paper schedule book. This lets you see availabilities across an entire week at one time.

Once you've looked over the available times and decided when to schedule, mouse over the time and day you want to schedule for, and click.

Next, you'll see a screen that offers you a choice - either search for an existing profile for the customer, or make a new profile. If you search, results will come back as you type the customer's name, so you won't usually have to type in full names.

After you've chosen the customer profile or made a new one, you can edit the details of the appointment (duration, reason, etc.), or if the defaults are fine, just hit the create button.

And once you hit create, voila, the new appointment appears on your schedule. That's all there is to it!

How to Import customers and appointments from AppointmentQuest

If you're interested in switching from AppointmentQuest (AQ) to AppointmentPlease, it's pretty simple. There is a caveat, however - to our knowledge, there's no way to export your customer's accounts, so they'll have to remake their accounts on AppointmentPlease. This is a bit of an inconvenience, but it doesn't take very long at all to do.

The export/import process is easy, and this tutorial will walk you through it. However, it can take a little while to complete the import, depending on how many customers/appointments you have in AppointmentQuest, so you may want to wait until you have some free time to start this.

Still here? OK, let's go! First we'll export the customers and appointments from AppointmentQuest (AQ). Sign in on AQ before proceeding.

Exporting AppointmentQuest Contacts/Customers

Once you're signed in to AQ, click "Index" under "Customers" in the side navigation bar.

This should bring you to the screen shown below. Click on the "Export Contacts" button.

On the next screen, make sure that "Generic Spreadsheet Compatible CSV Text File" is selected, and click the "Export" button.

Your exported contacts file should be downloaded. Make sure you can find it, we'll be using this file in a bit.

Exporting AppointmentQuest Appointments

Next, we want to export the appointments currently in AppointmentQuest. First, select "Timeline" from under the "Workarea" heading in the left navigation bar.

On the following screen, you'll see the number of appointments scheduled, broken down into various periods. Each period will have a number of buttons underneath. We'd like to export the largest number of appointments possible at once. In this case, it's "This Year", and that will actually be sufficient for us to get all of them, as there is no "Next Year", or any appointments in the next year, for that matter, in our setup. You may have to export/import appointments multiple times, though, depending on your setup.

To export the appointments in a given time range, click the "Export to Spreadsheet" button.

And you should see that that has been exported as well.

Once you've exported all of your customer data and appointments, it's time to import them into AppointmentPlease. For the next part, go to your AppointmentPlease administration screen.

Importing Customers into AppointmentPlease

Once you've reached your AppointmentPlease administration screen, click the account tab near the top of the screen. Once you're on the Account Management screen, scroll down until you see a section pertaining to importing AppointmentQuest data.

Click the "Choose File" button (this will vary from browser to browser, but it will be similar), and select the exported AppointmentQuest customer file you downloaded earlier.

Then, hit the "Go" button. It could take a very long time for this step to complete, depending on how many customers you're importing, so please be patient and don't disturb it. You may want to go make yourself something to drink.

When it completes, the page will reload and you should see a message similar to the one shown. If there were any failures, it will tell you so in red text.

Importing Appointments into AppointmentPlease

This procedure is essentially the same as with customers, except that you'll be using the second portion of the import screen, and you'll be using the appointment export file you downloaded earlier. Select that file and hit "go".

When it finishes, you'll see how many worked, and which ones failed. AppointmentQuest's exports sometimes have formatting problems, which the importer has trouble with. You should copy and paste any import failures into a text file and enter them as appointments manually. As you can see below, some of our appointments failed to import properly (some parts of the picture have been edited out).

Congratulations, you're done!

I hope you enjoy your AppointmentPlease experience. If you ever have any issues or think of things that would make AppointmentPlease more useful, please use the feedback button on the side of the screen, or send email to tophatmonkey@gmail.com. Thanks for using AppointmentPlease!

How to Change Plans/Cancel

This is very simple - log in to your administration site and click the Account tab near the top of the screen.

Near the top of the following page you'll see the plans, which have links provided to change to them. Near the bottom, you'll see instructions on how to delete your account (it only takes two more clicks).