Sync Multiple google Calendars

[everettwood]

Hello,

I am sharing an office with 2 other people, and we all use google calendar to sync to eachother. When I am using the appointment app, it is allowing me to sync my calendar, but it will not let me select the other calendars to make sure I don't double book. Is there a solution to this?

[Chad]

Hello @everettwood!

Have you added the two other individuals as staff members to your Appointments account? Currently you can only add one calendar per staff member. 

[NessRecords]

@Chad This makes zero sense to me and seems like a huge P.I.T.A.  Please allow me to explain:

Like @everettwood, I wish to use Appointments to book clients for myself and other service providers (staff).

We have one central studio calendar which reflects when the studio is available (or not).

Appointments appears to only sync our Google Calendar with *one* employee's schedule instead of our whole Appointments schedule. 

Creating duplicate Google Calendars to sync with each Appointments employee individually not only seems like a huge time waster [to maintain] but also greatly increases the risk of double bookings and other mistakes.

PLEASE EXPLAIN!

https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5387

[Chad]

Hello @NessRecords, I'm sorry to hear about the trouble. 

Did you select Import & Export options when linking each calendar? This should then show all personal events and appointments on your Square Calendar for each provider. 

[NessRecords]

@Chad As usual the prepared reply does not address my issue.

I want to sync my studio’s Google Calendar with my studio’s Square Appointments.

Is this possible? Why not?!?

[Chad]

Hey @NessRecords, it is possible to have your appointments display on your studios google calendar. Also you have the ability to have personal events show on the Square Appointments calendar. 

If you're having trouble with syncing the calendars could you share what happens?

This will help us troubleshoot the issue together. 🙂

[everettwood]

@Chad Hey, I have decided to revisit using Square Appointments, because I really don’t like Calendly (but they are the only ones who will allow me to see everyone’s availability) I am back in my appointments, and it shows that the time is booked off on my google calendar as Busy (unavailable) but on my Square Appointments it shows, that I am in fact available. This would easily cause over booking. My office mate is happy using google, calendar, and has no interests in moving over to square, and I do not want to spend $50 a month to “add and employee” just to make my availability correct. Is there a solution? I have resynced my calendar to have import and export, but its not showing correctly

[Helen]

Hello @everettwood, I'm Helen and I'm stepping in for Chad as he's not here today. Thanks for reconsidering Appointments, hopefully we can get you up and running ASAP! 

That definitely sounds strange that your Google Calendar is showing unavailable but your Appointments Calender is actually clear. This help article has a list of steps to troubleshoot your availability — there are a few different reasons this could happen and that article covers steps to resovle this. If that article doesn't do the trick please give us a call next week so a team member can look at your Calendar/Setting and see what's causing this.

[everettwood]

@Helen that didn't even come close to fixing the issue. I just want to explain this again.. maybe we can get a solution

Imagine you have a shared office space. Eric, Jessica, and myself are sharing one space. We each have our own office hours, our own calendars, our own schedules. We are 3 different people, with 3 different businesses. We use google Calendar to sync everything together, but for the sake of privacy, we can only block time off on each others schedule. This then shows, for example, my office is busy Monday at 1pm-2pm. It shows Eric has booked it. On google, my calendar is blocked. But on Square appointments, it shows I can have someone book. So if I were to switch over to Square Appointments, I would have a high likelyhood that someone would book Monday at 1pm, even though google calendar shows I'm unavailable. My google calendar would then show the space double booked, and our office is now overbooked. This is a problem clearly

Calendly can see that I am unavailable, and would not overbook the office. This is why i use Calendly. I also extremly dislike calendly and would love to leave, but Square Appointments is making it very difficult. The article you sent was about my availibility, and if my appointments that are showing from google show if im available or busy. That has nothing to do with what is happening now

[NessRecords]

Hi @Chad and @Helen, while your time is much appreciated the replies aren't helping. Please consider our perspective:

I have one studio, which can only be occupied by one customer at a time (think photography, music, etc.). Multiple employees are available for various services but only one may be booked at any given time. Right now, I have each employee registered and available for booking. Yesterday, a new customer booked employee #2 but the time still shows as "available" on my own schedule. How do I resolve this?

It would be SO MUCH EASIER if each staff member's calendar would aggregate(?) automatically into one single "studio calendar."

Also, another problem ... regarding the Google Calendar sync. (1) I synced my personal Google Calendar with my Square Appointments calendar. (2) I now see an Appointments feed on my Google dashboard but it has NOTHING on it - no appointments! (3) The appointments I create on my Google Calendar do not show on my Square Appointments front-end.

This is such a simple, straight-forward app. Why so complicated? Why so many calendars and sync issues?

YouCanBook.Me works INSTANTLY and seamlessly. I don't like their GUI nearly as much, but I'm seriously thinking of paying for their service because these issues here are so basic. As @everettwood mentioned the time wasted on the admin is not worth $50 / month.

[Helen]

Hi again @everettwood @NessRecords, I'm really sorry that my post didn't help. When you create an appointment in your Google Calendar does it sync with your Appointments Calendar? It sounds like the events your co-workers are booking are possibly on a shared calendar and that's why they're not syncing with Square Appointments. If you call our team they can check the sync is working properly on your account, unfortuately I'm not able to do that from here. 

@NessRecords You could customize your employees' availability so that they are available for your room and their times don't overlap, but right now the calendar won't do this automatically. 

For the other issue you mentioned it's important to make sure that when creating events on Google you must continue to add events to your main google calendar and not to the "Square Appointments" calendar that appears after you've intiated the sync. Events added to the Appointments calendar you see in your Google Dashboard will not show up in Square Appointments.

Thank you as well for your feedback about Square Appointments and calling out what you need for it to be suitable for your business. That is very helpful to the team as they work to add more features and improve exsisting ones.

[NessRecords]

@Helen a quick look at my account reveals I have already set up custom availability for my staff. The issue is having to manually change it every time someone books an appointment. Right now there are two issues leading me to cancel my trial subscription:

• If my staff fails to see a 'new booking' email notification, they won't know there's an appointment. That's dangerously close to an employee "no-show" or double-booking. Either would have devastating effects on my business, such as a negative review. Appointments booked on our "live" Square webpage are simply not appearing on our Google calendar [and yes, I am doing it correctly and synced properly]. Appointments manually added by myself to our "main" Google calendar show up on Square as unavailable, but our "location's" overall "custom availability" must be manually edited? Really!? HUGE DESIGN FLAW.

• I can't seem to customize the booking notifications sent to my employees. Some of the client information is unnecessary (some is private), while other information they do NOT receive should be included.

@everettwood we'd be better off deleting our staff profiles and downgrading to the free "single user" tier. This way there's only one availability calendar which automatically updates when a new booking happens. We can share it with our staff on Google (free). The downside is that our public-facing image will be one singular employee instead of a team but at least we'll get the rest of the lovely GUI benefits - and it won't cost a penny.

@Helen the inherent issues in your product are promoting the free platform instead of the paid platform. Maybe this will motivate a significant "upgrade."

[megs83]

I am a family entertainment center and I have been using Square since we reopened in August (and I LOVE it). I am kind of making things work for what we need because Square has not started a FEC type package. I am using appointments for families to schedule birthday parties. To presell admission I am using another scheduling software but I want to switch over to Square. Can I have two calendars for one location? I know I can add a service to my existing calendar but I don't want someone to accidently book a $10 admission and they think they are getting a birthday party. I would like to post a link to show only admission services. Or can they add items but book for a preset time? We have sessions that start at 10, 11:30, 1, 2:30, 4, and 5:30 and we only allow 20 jumpers per hour. Can a person ad 3 items (admission) into their cart for one of these specific times?  I am not sure if I am even making any sense. LOL

[AshleyK]

Hey @megs83 - 

  Thank you for reaching out in the Community and I appreciate the time in explaining how important this request is for your business. This is currently a feature request. The only way to really work around this is to either have multiple locations or staff members. 

To better track the feedback for this, I've merged your post with an existing thread. 

[megs83]

Can you possible pass on the request to have a Family Entertainment Center platform like you do with retail and restaurants. This is an area that is not heavily saturated and the options for POS in this category is extremely over priced and not as great and user friendly as square.