How to Create Appointment Types (Meetings)
Meetings and Appointments allow your clients and prospects to book time with you easily. With SimpleClient, you have a lot of flexibility in creating meetings, limiting your availability, charging for consultations or making them available for free.
Here are the steps for creating a meeting of any type:
Once you've sync'ed your calendar, you're ready to create your first meeting type.
From your dashboard, you're going to click on the down arrow for "consult". From there, you're going to click on meeting types.
SimpleClient offers lots of flexibility in creating appointments of any type. You can create appointments that require a fee before booking, or you can create free appointment types that don't require payment for booking.
You can create follow up appointments for existing clients that are also fee based. For example, a document review or a debt consultation and advice session. The flexibility is unlimited.
To create your first meeting, click on the new button.
From there, you can name the meeting whatever you like. Let's use "Free Initial Consultation" as an example. You can then click "Create Meeting Type."
Your meeting type will now show up in the dashboard with some initial default settings.
Editing a Meeting Type
To continue to edit the meeting type, can click on the gear icon and then click on edit. This is where we will change the default parameters.
From the edit meeting type screen, you will be able to:
- Add a description of your meeting
- Adjust who the meeting is with - this is helpful if there are multiple meeting participants or more than one provider for a given meeting type
- Choose the length of the meeting and any particular meeting notice or buffer times
Add a Meeting Description
To add a meeting description you simply fill out the description field. This is helpful in informing your prospect or client about what to expect with the meeting. For example, you can indicate that an initial consult is free only up to 30 minutes.
Multiple Calendars
If there are multiple members in your, firm that need to participate in a meeting. You can select them from the meeting edit screen for a given meeting type. This is helpful. If you have, multiple participants for a given meeting, say it's a complex legal matter and you want an associate to attend as well.
When multiple parties are selected, SimpleClient will check availability of all sync'ed calendar and only show available times when there is an open slot for all participants.
Buffer Settings for Meetings
You can then set a buffer of any length of before the meeting. So if you're doing a doc review, for example, you might want about a 30 minute buffer to be able to review documents in advance of the meeting. Or if you'd like to schedule back to back meetings, you might just want a five minute break to grab some water.
You can schedule buffer times before or after a meeting by choosing from the dropdown menu. You can choose a buffer time anywhere from no buffer time, up to 3 hours of buffer time.
Minimum Meeting Notice Time
The other great feature of simple client is you can set a minimum notice time for meetings. As you could imagine your schedule might be a little unpredictable because you're in court, you're handling personal matters, or you simply want more flexibility in how you handle time for focusing on client deliverables.
You could set a minimum amount of notice before a meeting will be able to be booked on your calendar. So for example, If a prospect with the link to your calendar clicks on that, the soonest available time will be delayed by the minimum notice time.
You could set this notice time by clicking on the drop down menu and choosing from no minimum notice on up to 24 hours notice.