Ask Our Appointments Product Managers and Designers Anything

[Tom]

Hello Sellers! On July 13th at 1pm PT / 4pm ET, we hosted a virtual office hours session within this thread where sellers had the opportunity to post questions and hear back from our Appointments team members! 

@rvoluck, @LoganSq, @winniecheng, and @pbarfield are product managers and designers on the Square Appointments team and, together, they took the lead in today's session. Having worked on a variety of features within Square Appointments and more than 6 years combined experience at Square, they addressed questions and make sure feedback went to the right decision makers. Learn more about Square Appointments.

A few example questions:

• How can I make sure I'm getting the most out of Square Appointments?
• What are the best strategies for using Square Appointments within my business type?
• There are so many different features available within Square Appointments, what are the top three things to keep in mind for someone who is getting started?

Note regarding account-specific questions: For your privacy and security, we are not able to address issues related to specific account status details in our public forums. If you need account assistance, please contact our Customer Success team and they'll be able to take a deeper dive.

[winniecheng]

Unfortunately we don’t currently have the ability for additional colors to apply to appointment statuses, but will take this into consideration as we think about annual plans and what to prioritize next year.

[BLGC]

When text reminders go out often the URL is broken into two parts and clients get an error message 

[BLGC]

Can we search all options of a client file and not just name or number? Maybe keywords?  For example if I create a form option for pet information  I would like to search all dogs named max or search all breeds shih tzu. 

[BLGC]

Can we have the option to update appointments and update series on the app and not just one or the other? 

[MegganDickson]

How do I allow stylists to use the app on their own phone to checkout their client sale, but not have full access to my dashboard? I tried to adjust in Teams and Permissions but was not successful.

[Kassi_]

Welcome back to the Community, @MegganDickson - 

Team Permissions has an option to set up permissions as a group or each staff member separately. Whenever you're setting those up, it would be best to start with the role first. That way you can add the role to specific team members. 

Once you open the role to edit, there is a section for Appointments permissions you can select. Are you looking for different options for them to have access to? They don't have to have access to your whole account to accept payments for their appointments. 

Another thing to consider is how your team members log in. Do they have their own log-ins or do they use yours? If you want to keep your entire dashboard private, I would suggest having them set up their own log-ins/profiles. 

Thank you!

[714POPUPS]

We host vendor popups and send invoices for each date through Square and so far it's been good. But what I'd like to do, using the appointments, is to set up an available date and have all of our vendors be able to access it based on the groups they're in. (the groups are the classification of the types of vendors they are (drinks, clothing, art, ETC) but limit the number of slots that each group can have. This way for example, the system will automatically not allow more than 2 drink vendors. If this is done properly, each vendor(customer) will be able to schedule themselves in our events, pay for the slot, and we can simply follow up with them once they're paid.

[pbarfield]

Hi @714POPUPS! We recently launched resource management which may be a solution to your use case. Resources, such as booths, stations, or rooms, can be set up to restrict the number of appointments for the same time slot. I think in your case, you could set up “resources” for each of the vendor types (e.g. Drink Booth 1, Drink Booth 2) so that when vendors are booking, there are only so many that can reserve at the same time.

Visit our Support Center article on resource management for additional information on how to set up. Hope this works out for you!

[714POPUPS]

Thats really helpful. I'm going to play around with it this week and hopefully get to use it for our September dates!

[Tom]

Update:

Hello again and thank you to everyone who contributed questions today—lots of thoughtful insights and feedback! I'm checking in at the end of the hour to let you know that, while the opportunity to ask new questions is closed, our Appointments team will continue to work through as many replies as they can over the next day.

Please keep watch for updates as well as a summary post that addresses the main themes that came up. We appreciate your patience, and thanks again for sharing! 💯

[Barbershop]

It would be nice to have a seperate space under items for consumables, items that are not for sell or part of the main inventory.. just backbar products, disinfectants, cleaning supplies, etc.

[Tom]

Update:

Hello to everyone following this thread!

I'm posting to let you know that the time to submit new questions for this Q&A session is closed. We weren't able to get to everything yesterday but the Appointments team will answer more questions as soon as they can.

Keep watch for notifications and thank you again for your patience.

[MichaelWilhelm]

I have a mobile detailing service where I use the appointments and have it set to go to the customers location. This works great however when I use the appointments app on android and add or modify an appointment it removes there address from the appointment. This becomes very frustrating having to call the customer back for there address the day I'm heading over to preform there service. I just wonder is there a fix for this? 

[winniecheng · Accepted solution]

Hello Everyone,

Thanks again for taking the time to share your questions over the last few weeks!

We hope your questions were answered and we appreciate your patience—the experiences you've shared will help us as we continue to iterate based on your feedback.

As we close out this event, we wanted to do a recap on a few themes that came up frequently:

• Making Online Booking easier for customers: categories to organize services and service modifiers support for exclusive add-ons
• Blocking certain customers from Online Booking
• New vs. returning clients customizations
• Group booking and multiple appointments check out
• Calendar customizations: color coding, info displayed
• Intake forms: make it easier to collect the data you need from customers
• Deposits, Waitlist, Packages/Memberships and Class Booking: key features that are either on our roadmap or that we will consider in our upcoming annual planning

We truly appreciate all of the questions and feedback. As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, all of your input here, as well as other seller feedback, will help inform our annual planning efforts and determine what should be prioritized for 2022. Stay tuned.

While this event is closed and we've answered nearly all of the Appointments-related questions, our product team will continue to address followup posts.

Again, thanks for your participation. We invite you to join our Beta Community as well, where you'll have the opportunity to test products and offer feedback as we develop new Appointments features.

For a review of other products we featured this month within the Seller Community, take a look at this post: Upcoming Events in Seller Community, July Edition.

[analog440]

Is it possible to customize the client intake form? Even the ability to change the text "Additional notes (optional)" to something more meaning full would be super helpful.