Penciled-in appointments
A penciled-in appointment is a time you have offered a client but the client has not confirmed. Pawdmin lets you offer up to five times for one appointment, holds them on your calendar, and releases the others the moment the client picks one.
How penciled-in appointments work
- You choose the times. When you schedule an order, Pawdmin's appointment wizard finds open times and lets you offer between one and five options for each appointment date. You create each option either as penciled-in or as confirmed.
- Pawdmin sends them to the client. One button on the calendar sends the client the penciled-in times together with the estimate, by email and text message. The message lists the times and links to the client's portal.
- The client picks. In the client portal the client sees the offered times, approves the estimate and chooses a time with a button labelled "Choose This Time".
- Pawdmin tidies up. The chosen time becomes a confirmed appointment and the order becomes scheduled. The other options are marked as not chosen and stop holding space on your calendar. You get a notification.
Why offer times instead of opening the calendar
Clients using Pawdmin never see your calendar. They see only the times you chose to offer them. You decide which days you work and how each day is arranged. The client still gets a choice, and people keep appointments they chose themselves.
The feature is based on how Betty Peto ran her own paper calendar before Pawdmin existed: two to four options in pencil, and the client picks.
What a penciled-in time does on your calendar
- It holds the slot. A penciled-in time blocks that time for other bookings until the client chooses or you remove it.
- It is not counted as income. Pawdmin's daily money totals leave penciled-in times out. Only confirmed appointments count. See the Money Meter.
- It does not expire by itself. Pawdmin has no automatic timeout on a penciled-in time. If a client does not answer, the hold stays until you clear it.
Penciled-in times for a whole year
Offering options is not limited to a single appointment. When you schedule a repeating appointment for the year, you can offer several options for every date and send them to the client together. See year-ahead scheduling.
Last updated