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.

[megs83]

When will square start allowing a deposit before booking? Without a required deposit (not a card on file as that’s useless) I am not able to use Swuare Appointments.

[MPhin09]

I second that this would be a very helpful feature without having to manually send our customers invoices for an appointment deposit. 

[winniecheng]

Thanks for the question. We’ve heard a lot of feedback about how vital deposits are to protecting your time as a Square seller. While deposits are certainly something we’re thinking about, we’re currently blocked on delivering that feature by some internal platform improvements that we’re actively working on.

In the meantime, we are working on some improvements to our no show protection features to help protect your time as a Square seller. We just released a feature where customers that manually input a card for no-show protection while booking an appointment through the Online Booking Site must input a card that is not expired by the date/time of the appointment. We’re also working on adding a temporary $1 pre-authorization on no-show protection cards, where the customer will be asked to input a different card if the authorization fails.

Before we can build deposits into the Square Appointments product we’d love to hear more about your use case for deposits to keep in mind for the future. If you can provide insight into these questions that would be very helpful to our team. 

• How would you like to determine the deposit amount? Is it a set amount or a % of the booking?
• When would you like the deposit to be collected?
• How would you expect deposits to interact with cancellation policies?
• Is there anything else we should know about what you expect from a deposits feature?

[Dragon18]

I’d love a deposit feature.

-our deposit would be a set amount

-we’d collect at the time of booking

-deposit would be non-refundable and would equal the cancellation fee

-holding the card number for damage protection per our contract would also be appreciated, but just having a deposit feature would be so much better.

[Djwhysham617]

Their is a deposit feature, just unclick the ACH button when creating an invoice and it should pop up a payment plan

[Loveandserenity]

There isn’t a deposit option when booking appointments. Only when sending invoices. 

[Jeanne100]

Please do Not add a deposit for everyone’s account, as this would be completely inappropriate for many businesses, such as that of Therapists (and many others).  I would prefer not to have any deposit charged at all, to a customer’s account, at the time of booking. Please just instead add a statement that would read: “You will Not be charged at this time” Or preferably “You will not be charged at this time, only after your appointment has ended” under No Show protection.

Thank you.

[megs83]

When will Square Appointments allow “add-on” items to a booking? I want to sell a pizza and other items during a booking but there is t an easy way to do this. 

[dergoldberg]

I have a lot of clients that would love to have this feature also! Thanks for mentioning this. 🙂 

[CanvasNC]

I thought you could do this with modifiers, but maybe I am wrong?

[winniecheng]

Thanks for your question! To clarify, are you referring to allowing customers to add items when booking an appointment through the Online Booking Site?

If so, we'd love to hear more about this use case. Could you share a little more about your business and the types of items you want customers to add when booking online?

[TopEnd]

I would love this as well, as we are an auto detailing business and we need add ons for appointments on the booking side such as excessive dirt, pet hair, pick up drop off, travel fee, etc.

[Blueangels7]

I have a salon. Let's say a client books an All Over Color. They could have check boxes where they can do add ons that have times that extend the appointment like say add a cut, deep conditioning treatment, oil, hot towel, shoulder massage, scalp massage. It isn't possible to put all of those things as different combos in the drop down box. It would take them forever to root through all of those. Instead it would look like

Pick Category: Color

Pick service: All Over Color

Pick add ons: (check boxes for different things that add time and money to the appointment)

Add Cut

Add Deep Conditioning Treatment

Add oil

Add scalp massage

Then it would total up time and give available spaces for that combo as well as total for the entire appointment. 

This is MUCH needed for so many different industries that use this app!!!!

[dergoldberg]

I would love to see if the Square team could integrate this: There are days that I travel for service appointments and there are days that I have to stay at home and work remotely. I'd love to see an option where services performed at the client's locations was unavailable for a day and only remote services were available. Maybe this could be a toggle feature for the Personal Event option?

[lambertt]

I have seen on the threads for more than two years your customers asking for the ability to schedule classes so a set number of customers could sign up/buy a ticket for the class.   I see post that says that this is a popular request, but 2 years seems like Square is not interested in adding that function.   Can you elaborate on the current plans.

[winniecheng]

Hi @lambertt, thanks for asking about this. We definitely have heard a lot of feedback about the need to support classes and it’s something that we’d love to tackle. Unfortunately, we’re currently blocked on delivering that feature by some internal platform improvements that we’re actively working on, so we can’t provide further elaboration on timeline.

But we’re glad that the community is continuing to ask about this, and we definitely want to continue to hear any feedback you have about classes. If you’re interested, we’d love to reach out to you to learn more about your specific needs around classes when we are able to tackle it. Let us know!

[lambertt]

I’ll be glad to share my perspectives as one that has never created a website before and frantically trying to learn how to as quickly as possible.  

[TCSlaguna]

We would like an easy way to see appointments made and which ones were paid/unpaid. We would like an easy way to calculate how much to pay our Service Providers.

To do this, we need a report that provides:
1. Created Date
2. Appointment Length
3. Client Name
4. Staff
5. Paid/Unpaid
6. Amount Paid for Service
7. Tip Amount Given

Currently Items 1-4 are available under Appointments-> Settings -> History, Items 5-7 are not.

Transactions-> filter by Service Provider shows when a payment was made. Does not show appointment date/time and unpaid appointments.

Using the Appointments mobile app. Calendar View: List, Employees: select Service Provider. Shows a nice list of appointments, date/time, appointment length. Does not show paid/unpaid, amount paid for service, tip amount given. Have to click on each individual appointment to get that information. 

[MPhin09]

YES!! I second this would be an incredibly helpful feature!

[winniecheng]

Hi @TCSlaguna, I can definitely see how that report would be useful. Thanks for providing such a detailed suggestion.

One question I do have is whether you use Square Payroll. If so, you might already be able to pull a similar report through Payroll. Let me know if that’s something you’re interested in learning more about, and I can get back to you after confirming with the Payroll team.

[TCSlaguna]

Hi @winniecheng, we do not currently use Square Payroll. Can you please provide info on how Square Payroll can provide us with that data, such as unpaid appointments? 

Also, I believe it should be a core feature of Appointments, as it is part of the appointment creation, charging, and reviewing payments process. Our cashiers review appointments made for the day and ensure that all clients have paid. Payroll is done by owner/manager.