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.

[mapromonyc]

Can you bring back the feature where we can edit the employee assigned to an appointment? 

[jun2955]

I think it should be there already under edit appointment!

[LoganSq]

Hi mapromonyc, this should be possible via the appointment edit screen. Are there situations where there isn’t working for you?

[Helloduff]

Yooooo - how can i have multiple people from my company see a calendar for appointments?  I do not want the customer to select someone, but i would like to assign things to my team members. 

[CanvasNC]

Make sure they aren't able to accept online bookings for certain services, I have this feature set up as well.

[LoganSq]

Hi Helloduff, If you’d like to assign appointments to an employee, they’ll need to be added to appointments as a staff member. Once you’ve done that you can prevent your customers booking them online by turning off the ‘Bookable by customers online’ toggle for that staff member

[richrep]

Hi,

Are you able to accomplish the following with Square Appointments for a recording studio?

• 2 Studio Rooms
• Multiple audio engineers
• have each room only bookable with there is an available engineer, and prevent double booking of the studio rooms, or engineers?

Thanks!

[MPhin09]

Hi, Square user here!

Create 2 Services 

  1. Studio #1

  2. Studio #2

Add each Engineer as an employee and edit their availability so Studio #1 or #2 can only be booked when each employee (engineer) is available.

Using the resource feature may also be helpful for you. 

I think what you're asking for may already be doable 😉 Good luck! Maybe the Square Team will be able to add some helpful insight!!

[Dragon18]

The problem with this is that not all of my resources require staffing, but they do require the item to be available.  If I rent equipment out, for example, it may be unavailable for a few days, but the staff is still available to rent something else out.  While I see I can add resources to a booking, I can’t remove staff and need the resources to have their own calendar.

[LoganSq]

Hey richrep, yeah it sounds like resource management could work well for you here. You’ll need to create two resources (one for each studio room) and then for each service that needs a studio, toggle on ‘resource required’ and select your studios. Let me know if this works for you!

[StellarStudio]

"On July 13th at 1pm PT / 3pm ET"

1pm PT and 3pm ET are not the same time. Is it 1pm PT / 4pm ET, or 12pm PT / 3pm ET?

[Tom]

Oh good catch, @StellarStudio! It's happening July 13th at 1pm PT / 4pm ET. I've made the correction in the original post. Thank you and sorry for the confusion! 

[plynchbsdh]

Hello,

1. Is it possible to add a required field(s) for self-scheduling clients such as birthdate?
2. I sell skincare products and I also use these products in skin care services. I would like an additional category in inventory to indicate product "in use" or "other" or a blank where we can fill in the category. But ideally, I would like to show it transferred to my other inventory for Spa Disposables. 

Thank you.

[Barbershop]

Yes to this post!

[Elsiecl65]

1. Yes! Agree with a required field.  I need it to be a word, not a date... so perhaps an empty field that we can specify what information is needed?
2. Concur with other requests for: Categorize services in the back office under service library opposed to only listing services alphabetically.  I have multiple services that span 3 - 4 separate appointments with one payment.  As of now, I must list each service and it's corresponding (#1,2,3,4) which makes that appointment page cumbersome and long.  I'd love to see it more user friendly.  right now, I list the service with a 'modifier' drop down box.  But there are 2 problems with it:  1.  They book the appointment #1 on the calendar, checkout and have to go back to the main page and select the service again.  #2.  But many clients miss the drop down box to book appointment #2, 3 & 4 and end up paying twice, or more.
3. Also could really use the waitlist so many have asked about.

Thanks!!

[winniecheng]

1) We recently kicked off work on buyer intake forms, but unclear whether or not the scope of the work will include the ability to add a required field to the online booking site flow. We will take this feedback into consideration once we dive deeper into feature development. Thank you!

2) We are planning on working later this year on making it easier for clients to book the right services by enabling you to organize services into categories when booking online. But it sounds like you’re looking specifically to enable clients to book multiple appointments across different dates, but also pay upfront for all of the appointments. Do I have that right? Can I ask if clients want to book all sessions at once, or do they book sessions separately? I would love to hear more about the flow you’re looking for here.

3) We agree that waitlists is a key feature and can confirm it’s on our roadmap for next year. Stay tuned.

[JessPoynter]

Yes! Having a "backbar" or some other option would be AMAZING!! 

[LoganSq]

Hi plynchbsdh, adding a custom field for self-scheduling clients isn’t possible at the moment unfortunately, but this is an area we’re investigating currently. Is this info something you’d only want new clients to enter?

Can you tell me a little more about #2? It sounds like you could be trying to track the quantity of stock you have on hand?

[Yami]

Will there be a way to edit an appointment series without it deleting previous appointments? I always have to cancel one appointment at a time in a series to avoid the system deleting previous sessions that already occurred.

[LoganSq]

Hi Yami, we’re actually working on this right now! Soon when you cancel an appointment that's in a series you’ll have the option of choosing ‘cancel this and following appointments’