Booking & Cancellation Settings

This article discusses various options for customizing your scheduling and booking workflow in Practice Better:

• Setting up Session Reminders
• Adjusting Availability for Events in External Calendars (Google/Apple)
• Customizing the Availability Times Displayed to your Clients
• Limiting Gaps Between Bookings
• Make Me Look Busy
• Setting up restrictions on how early or late clients can book sessions
• Hourly, Daily, Weekly & Monthly Session Limits
• Customizing your Bookings Page Defaults
• Customizing your Practice Better Calendar
• Customizing your Cancellation Settings
• Adding an Out-of-Office Notification

Session Reminders

Enable the Send session reminders for upcoming sessions option. Depending on your plan, you can send up to 3 reminders for your upcoming sessions. 

Reminders can be sent either by email/Instant Alert and/or text. You also have the option of sending yourself email reminders.

You can customize how many reminders are sent for all services from your Booking & Cancellation Settings page or on a service-by-service basis.

SMS Text Reminders
On our paid plans, you have the option to send text (SMS) reminders for upcoming sessions. This method can be used in combination with regular email reminders. Under the Delivery method field in the Add Reminder popup, select either:

• Text messages (SMS) and email - Both a text message and email are sent to your client
• Text messages (SMS) only - We'll attempt to send a text message to the mobile phone number listed in your client's record. If there are any issues sending the text (e.g. invalid phone number), we'll send an email reminder to your client.

View our article on SMS reminders to learn more about SMS availability in your country and tips on formatting numbers to ensure reminders are delivered to your clients.

Sending Reminders Manually

We provide the option to send one-off reminders in the event your client did not receive or confirm their upcoming session. To do this, go to My Schedule > My Bookings, then select Send reminder from the More Options menu (3 dots):

Advanced Availability Options

We encourage you to set up your availability so your clients will request sessions when you're most likely to accept these bookings. 

Allow my clients to request sessions outside of regular availability
Enable this option to allow clients to book one-on-one sessions on days where you have not set up availability. On days without availability, we display availability from 9-5 PM.

E.g., if you've set up availability on Monday-Wednesday from 9 am to 3 pm, your client can still request a session on Thursday at 4 pm. 

Allow my clients to request sessions regardless of conflicting events in external calendars
By default, if you link your Google/Apple calendar to Practice Better, we ensure clients cannot request sessions that conflict with busy events in your Google Calendar.

Keep in mind, clients will still be able to request sessions that conflict with "Free/Available" events, which is the typical setting for birthdays and holidays.

Enable this option to ignore events in your external calendar when displaying availability times to your clients.

Exclude external calendar all-day events
By default, we allow clients to book sessions that conflict with all-day events, so long as these events are labeled as "Free/Available" in your Google Calendar.

Enable this option to ignore both Free and Busy all-day events.

Buffer time for external events
Buffer time is useful if you need to take into account prep-time and travel between sessions and personal appointments. We'll ensure no sessions are requested during your buffer time periods.

For example, let's say you've set up your buffer time for 30mins before and after external events. On Wednesday you have a dentist appointment from 10am-11am.

If you've set up Availability on that day, your clients will be unable to select a time slot between 9:30 am and 11:30 am inclusive. The earliest slot available to them will be @ 11:30 am.

Learn more about managing your availability.

Availability Display

Use these options to customize how availability times are displayed on your Bookings Page. 

Rolling Start Times
Example rolling start times for a 30-minute service will be displayed as: 

• 10:00 - 10:30 AM
• 10:15 - 10:45 AM
• 10:30 - 11:00 AM
• 10:45 - 11:15 AM

(Based on 15-minute availability increments)

Rolling start times may limit the number of bookings available if a client requests a session in the middle of your availability period.

Limiting Gaps Between Bookings (one-on-one sessions)

We can recommend times adjacent to your existing events to reduce the number of gaps in your schedule. This option is available for clients booking one-on-one sessions from your Bookings Page and Client Portal.

Learn more

Make Me Look Busy (one-on-one sessions)

If enabled, we'll limit the number of available slots displayed to clients on a given day.

For example, if there are 10 available slots and you want to display 20% of your availability, we'll display the 2 available slots. Under Distribute slots.. you will have the option to select when you want the remaining slots to be visible.

If Limit gaps between bookings is enabled, slots adjacent to existing events will be chosen before selecting slots based on start time.

Booking Restrictions

Use booking restrictions to restrict how early or far in the future a client can request a session. 

Rolling Availability
You can set up your availability to restrict bookings based on a rolling date range. 

For example, if you set this to 7 days and it's currently January 1, we'll prevent clients from booking after January 7

Hourly, Daily, Weekly & Monthly Session Limits

Session limits allow you to control how many one-on-one sessions clients can request during a given hour, day, and/or week. Limits can be set up for all or specific services. The session limits do not apply when booking sessions on behalf of clients from your portal.

Daily Session Limits

You can limit the total number of sessions booked per day by selecting a value in the Maximum sessions per day picklist:

Setting this restriction will limit the total number of sessions that can be requested for a given day, regardless of the service being booked.

Service Specific Limits

To add a session limit for a specific service, check the Enable session limits per service checkbox:

A popup will appear allowing you to select the services you wish to limit and the hourly/daily/weekly/monthly restrictions. You can set up any combination of these limits (e.g. a per day limit of 2 sessions and a per week limit of 6 sessions):

Provide a label for your limit and click Done. Click Save Changes to save your booking settings.

Additional limits can be defined by clicking the Add another button in the top-right corner of the Session Limits section.

Both sessions and pending session requests are considered when determining how many additional sessions can be requested based on the limits you've set up.

A session counts toward an hourly limit if the session date falls within a given hour.

Booking Page Options

Allow Clients to Book on Behalf of Family Members

By default, clients have the option to request sessions, packages and register for programs on behalf of family members when booking from your public Bookings Pages. Learn more

On the Contact Information step of the booking process, the primary client (e.g. the mother) will see the following checkbox displayed:

Disable this option if you would like to hide the "I'm booking for a family member" checkbox on your Bookings Pages.

Hide Referral and Note to Practitioner Questions

Disable this option if you would like to hide the following questions on the Contact Information step of your Bookings Pages:

You can collect additional information from clients by setting up a Bookings Page Form.

Redirect URL
Customize the page clients are redirected to after booking a service or package from your Bookings Page.

You can also adjust the Redirect URL for individual services, packages, and programs, and for custom bookings pages.

Calendar Display Options

Customize the display and behavior of your Practice Better calendar.  You can set up defaults for the first day of the week displayed (the default is Sunday) and the first time display when the calendar is loaded. 

Event Naming Convention
Customize how events are displayed in your Practice Better and Google Calendars. This setting applies to sessions and booking requests.

Hide Personal Events from Team Members

By enabling this setting, team members with read-only access to your calendar will see your personal events displayed as "Busy".

Personal event details will still be visible to team members who have access to create sessions and events on your behalf.

Customizing your Cancellation Settings

Practice Better gives you the option to display and implement a cancellation policy when a client attempts to cancel or reschedule an upcoming session. (e.g. any cancellations or rescheduling within 48 hours will not be permitted). To enable this setting, select Display a cancellation policy when clients cancel or reschedule sessions.

You can customize the Cancellation policy message that displays when a client attempts to cancel or reschedule a session.

You can also restrict clients from cancelling or rescheduling their sessions completely or within a specific time period before their session.

To prevent clients from cancelling or rescheduling a session within a certain time frame, click the Prevent clients from cancelling or rescheduling drop-down menu and select from options ranging from 1 hour to 7 days before the session:

If you’d like to strictly not allow for any cancellations or rescheduling, you can update this setting to Always.

If you’d like to give clients the ability to cancel or reschedule at any time, you can update this setting to Don’t prevent.

Your cancellation notice will appear to your clients when they click on the reschedule or cancellation options that are made available to them in the Client Portal and email notifications.

You can also override your default settings and set a cancellation policy per service. Please visit our help article on this feature for more information: Setting Up and Reinforcing Your Cancellation Policy