Tip # 163
New Appointment Program

A revamped appointment scheduler program is now available with flowerSoft Silver 2014.  Here are the new features…

First, we have a new menu.

and a new input screen…

The new program will check for conflicts after the “Appointment For”, “Appointment Date” and “From” fields are filled.
If a conflict is found, a screen displaying the conflicting appointment is displayed, but no other action is taken.  In other words, you can have conflicting appointments if you want.

At any point during the input process, you can select to display other appointments for the employee selected by pressing the F8 key.  If no initials have been entered yet, the appointments for all the employees will be displayed.  Also note that you have additional options available for the appointment highlighted, such as view, delete and update.

There is a 3-month calendar available by pressing the F3 key from any field on the form. there is also a field to enter an account number, if the customer has an account with you.

There is also an account number field…

If a valid account number is entered, flowerSoft will fill some of the remaining fields, like name, phone number and e-mail address (if available) but still give you the opportunity to change them if you must.

As you can see above, there is also an “Occasion” field which allows you to define the reason for the appointment.

There are also 3 lines to briefly describe the reason for the appointment.

The most significant improvement to the appointment calendar if the addition of an email reminder feature.
This new feature will allow you to send e-mail reminders to your customers starting at a pre-determined number of days before the appointment date.
The program defaults to 3 days prior and just 1 e-mail reminder, but you can change these settings at will. An e-mail reminder can only be sent once every day, unless you use the option to clear the “e-mail sent” flag from the file, which is available from the menu.
So if you enter that you want to start sending reminders 3 days prior the appointment date and then enter that you want to send a maximum of 6 reminders, flowerSoft will respond with…

If at any time you select to view an existing appointment, flowerSoft will let you know when was the last time it sent an e-mail reminder to the customer and how many reminders have been sent.

This is what the e-mail reminder to the customer will look like:

The e-mail reminders are sent automatically, but only if you select to send them for each specific appointment by entering a “Y” in the “E-Mail Reminder?” field.
While this is the default for every reminder entered which is accompanied by an e-mail address, you always have the opportunity to enter “N” in that field.

You also have the option to send the e-mail remainders manually by selecting option R from the Appointments menu but remember that if the e-mail was already sent on that date, it will not be sent again unless you clear the e-mail sent flag through option C of the same menu.

If you want to send an e-maul reminder again just for a specific appointment, it is best to do it from the appointment record itself.
Just access the record via option E of the menu and when the record you want to send an e-mail reminder is in view, press the letter E and the e-mail will be sent again even if it has already been sent during the same day.

and of course, a report can be printed for appointments recorded for one or all employees, for the selected date range.

flowerSoft will give you a warning of an upcoming appointment…

but only if you have the appointments warning enabled!

If you have wedding or any other event consultation, you should start using the Appointment Calendar feature, and if you come up with some ideas for improvements (for this or any other program), please let me know.