What's New in This Release
Available on: Desktop · Web · Phone
Setup Appointments has been rebuilt. It opens from the same place — Billing\Setup Appointments — and works with all of your existing appointments, customers, stylists, packages and settings. What has changed is the window around them, a number of new features, and — for the first time — the whole Appointment Manager in the web browser and on a phone.
Installations on the current release open the new Setup Appointments. Older installations continue to open the earlier screen until they are updated.
What you will notice first
A menu instead of a row of buttons
The buttons along the top of the old window have been replaced by a menu on the left, grouped into Appointments, Billing, Packages, Configuration and Print Designs. Double-click an item to open it. The menu can be hidden with << to give the diary the full width.
Screens open as tabs
The Appointment Viewer, Job Slip Viewer, attendance, bills and the package screens — Package-Customer Link, Batch Manager and Setup Package — now open as tabs inside the one window, instead of separate windows. You can keep several open and switch between them. Close Tab closes the one in front.
A filters panel beside the diary
The Appointment Viewer has a Filters panel on the left with:
filters by Customer, Stylist and Status, and a Today only switch,
a list of the appointments on screen — customer, service, start and end, duration, status, stylist and cost — that stays in step with the diary: select one and it is selected in the diary too.
A new Search Appointment button on the diary's toolbar finds a customer's next open appointment on any date and jumps straight to it.
On the desktop a calendar strip sits beside it for moving between dates. Both can be folded away with <<. On the web the Filters panel opens on the right and also holds Search Appointment, and the diary's own date picker does the calendar's job.
Your layout is remembered
Each user's view, grouping, Work time only setting and which panels were open are saved and restored the next time — separately on the desktop and on the web.
Now on the web and on a phone
The Appointment Manager now runs in the web browser as well as on the desktop, and the screens are designed to work on a phone.
The diary, booking, walk-ins, grouped appointments, statuses, check-in, the Job Slip Viewer, attendance, reminders, packages, the Batch Manager and the settings are all available on the web. Only Create New Bill, Customer Advance, Direct Sale of a package and the Print Designs stay on the desktop.
On a phone: the menu floats over the diary, a long press opens the actions for an appointment, and Move / Change Length replace dragging.
Completing an appointment on the web opens the POS billing page with the appointment's services already filled in. After saving, you come back to the diary where you left it.
Reminders on the web show as a badge on the page and pop up when new appointments become due.
See Using Appointments on the Web and Phone for the full comparison.
Things that work differently
Parameter values at check-in — the window for recording a client's before/after values now opens after the appointment is saved, not during the save. The appointment is kept even if you close it without entering everything; you are told how many services still need values.
The time is checked again when you press OK — if someone else has booked the same stylist at that time while you were working, you are told which service and stylist clashed, and nothing is saved.
Appointments must fit inside the branch's hours — a booking cannot start at or after the shift end, and a stylist is offered only if the service finishes by then.
The stylist you clicked is used — when you double-click a free time in a stylist's column, the first service goes straight to that stylist, at their first free time that day.
Prefix and number — the next number appears when you pick or leave the prefix, and the prefix you used is remembered only once the appointment has been saved.
Customer's sex asked once — if a customer's sex is not recorded and your setting is to ask, you are asked once for that customer, not again for every service or search.
Cancelling asks for the reason first — if you cancel the reason window, the appointment is not cancelled.
The Job Slip Viewer opens showing the last 30 days. Clear the date to see everything.
The Time Slot Finder now searches only the weekdays you tick, so days you did not tick no longer use up the number of slots you asked for.
Corrections
These used to go wrong and now work as they should:
Cancelling several appointments at once now gives the used package services back.
Confirming an appointment or moving it to the lobby no longer clears its cancellation reason.
Cancelled grouped appointments no longer appear in the diary's Current view.
Detaching an appointment from a job slip no longer removes every service on it.
A package payment that pays nothing is now refused, instead of reporting success.
A payment that fails to save no longer clears the screen as if it had worked.
Select All in Package Sale now ticks only the services of the chosen package.
A cancellation reason with no description now shows its name.
A batch session left open from an earlier day now still shows its participants, and the participant search offers only the batch's own services.
The first time you open it
Your appointments, customers, packages and main settings are all carried across. A few personal display preferences from the old screen start fresh and need setting once:
which stylists are shown in the diary,
the column layout of the Job Slip Viewer.
The last prefixes you used are picked up from the old screen on the same computer where possible; otherwise choose them once.
The Job Slip and Final Job Slip print designs carry across unchanged. The Package Payment and Package Refund receipt designs are copied across automatically the first time they are needed.
On the web
Everything in this release is also on the web and on a phone, apart from the desktop-only items listed above. See Using Appointments on the Web and Phone.