Appointment Settings

The Appointment Settings page allows you to configure every aspect related to appointments within CloudBridal. This includes your business hours, appointment schedules, and more.

General Settings

The Settings tab contains the main configuration options for appointments.

Appointment Scheduler Preview

You can click this button any time you make changes to your appointment settings. This lets you preview the appointment scheduler from a customer's perspective, so you can validate that your changes look correct.

Business Hours

In this section, you can manage the hours that your business is available for appointments. Although this will typically be your hours of operation, you may wish to reserve some time at the beginning or end of a day for operational work, in which case you would want to adjust the times accordingly.

General Appointment Settings

Enable to condense your calendar to only the days your store is open: This setting hides the days of the week that your store is marked as closed from the calendar way. This is a good way to simplify the calendar so you don't waste screen space. However, you may wish to turn this off if your appointments can occur outside of normal business hours.
Enable appointment slot waitlist: If you would like customers to be able to add themselves to a waitlist for either a time slot or a day, you can enable this option.
Display 'Powered by CloudBridal' link in scheduler: This is helpful if you would like to show support for CloudBridal, but otherwise you can turn this off.
Enable URL parameter tracking in scheduler: Allows you to add custom parameters to your appointment type URLs. This is useful for advanced users who want to provide different links to their customers for different referral sources like Google Ads, Facebook, and so on.
Follow-up Types: This section allows you to set the available follow-up appointments that you support. This generally represents fittings, pick-ups, and so on.
Minimum booking lead time (hours): Customers can book available appointment slots starting this many hours ahead.
Maximum booking lead time (months): Customers can book available appointment slots up to this many months ahead.
Appointment Scheduler Accent Color: In order to give you a few color branding capabilities, you can set a color here. This color will be used to accent the appointment scheduler that customers see. You can either enter a hex color code to pick an exact color or use the color picker.

Appointment Types

This section allows you to create the types of appointments that you handle. Each appointment type has the following data:

Name: The name of the appointment type. e.g. Bridal Appointment.
Duration: The length in minutes that the appointment runs for.
Type: Bookable First-Time: For initial appointments that customers can book through your scheduler. Bookable Follow-Up: For follow-up appointments that customers can book through your scheduler. Internal: Appointments that can only be created by you or your staff.
Customer Type: The system type that should be assigned to prospect records that are created from the appointment.
Description: You can enter a description for the appointment type so that your customers can get a quick idea of what the appointment is for.
Start/End Date: Allows you to specify a date range that the appointment type should be bookable by a customer. Useful for things like events or one time sales.
Override Lead Times: If you wish to override the global lead times for this appointment type only, you can do so by setting the appropriate values.
Is Paid Appointment Type: Displays only if you have configured the Stripe Integration.
Price: Displays only if you have configured the Stripe Integration and have selected Is Paid Appointment Type. This allows you to set the price that the customer will be charged when booking this appointment type.

Appointment Resources

This section allows you to assign a Resource to an appointment type. A resource can be anything, but a good place to start is to create a resource for each fitting room in your shop. Each resource has the following data:

Name: The name of the resource. e.g. Fitting Room #1
Handled Appointment Types: A list of the appointment types that that resource can handle. Even if a room can fit multiple appointment types in, you still may want to split this up into different types for the most control. For example, you may prefer more brides book an appointment over other customer types, in which case you would provide more resources available to handle bridal appointments.
Calendar Display Color: The color that appointments booked for this resource will appear on your calendar. This is a good visual indicator, especially if you have a lot of concurrent appointments.

Appointment Schedules

After setting your appointment types and resources, you can finally start to define your actual weekly schedule. Each schedule you create maps an appointment resource to a time range in a day of the week. Each schedule has the following data:

Day of the Week: Each schedule is associated to a single day of the week.
Resource: Each schedule is associated to a single appointment resource, which you have created above.
Auto Accept Requests: If you enable this, it will mark appointments as Confirmed if a customer requests a time where this resource is available. Otherwise, appointments will begin in the Pending state, where you will need to manually approve it.
Select Specific Availability: By default, a resource can be booked for your store open hours. However, you can override it by selecting specific time periods within 15-minute increments. This is a great way to have full control over when customers can book appointments. For example, if you take lunch every day from 12-1pm, you can block that time out by unchecking each box from 12-1pm. This ensures that customers cannot book an appointment that falls within this time.

Appointment Scheduling Embed Code

This section provides you various options in displaying your appointment scheduler to your customers so that they can use it to book appointments. The options are:

General: This is a generic HTML embed that can be put into any website.
WordPress: Certain WordPress instances block the use of iframes, which is how the General embed code works. In these instances, you will need to use a plugin such as iframe to enable the embed.
Direct Link: You can provide this link anywhere, whether it be on your website, social media page, or anywhere else. This link includes your logo image as well and is mobile-friendly. This is a great option if you are having technical difficulties with the embeddable options above.

Field Setup

The Field Setup tab contains the configurations related to appointment fields.

Custom Fields: See the Custom Field Management documentation for more information about how to configure custom fields. One thing to note is that these custom fields will be displayed in your appointment scheduler to your prospective customers.
Default Field Configuration: This section allows you to set the Visible and Required checkboxes for several of the default fields that CloudBridal provides for appointments.

Email Settings

The Email Settings tab provides several configurations related to appointment emails:

Appointment Updated Message

This message is sent any time the Status of an appointment changes, or if an appointment is created for the first time. For example, if an appointment changes from the Pending to Confirmed status, this email will be sent out. The possible options are as follow:

Enable to send an email to the customer when an appointment is pending, confirmed, declined, or cancelled: You can turn off the appointment updated email altogether by unchecking this box.
Enable to send a copy to the 'Business Email Address' configured in the General tab whenever an appointment is created or updated: If you uncheck this, only the customer will receive appointment-related emails.
Set 'Pending' Appointment Email Custom Text: Enabling this allows you to set the header text for an appointment email when the customer creates a new appointment request.
Set 'Confirmed' Appointment Email Custom Text: Enabling this allows you to set the header text for an appointment email when a store associate confirms the customer's appointment request.
Set 'Store Declined' Appointment Email Custom Text: Enabling this allows you to set the header text for an appointment email when a store associate declines the customer's appointment request.
Set 'Customer Cancelled' Appointment Email Custom Text: Enabling this allows you to set the header text for an appointment email when the customer cancels their own appointment request.

Appointment Reminder Message

This message is sent as a reminder when a customer's appointment is coming up in the near future. You can configure the following data:

Enable to send an appointment reminder email to the customer when their appointment is coming up: Checking this will enable the appointment reminder email.
Days Before Appointment to Send Message: This is the number of days before the appointment date when the reminder message should be sent to the customer.
Appointment Reminder Message Text: This is the text that should be displayed in the appointment reminder email.