Our Pro and Premium plans include online booking and payments. We use the Appointments + plugin for this.
Appointments + has 45+ Premium Features
Features that rival the most sophisticated – and much more expensive – booking platforms.
Unlimited services
Unlimited service provider profiles
Set “black out” days
Schedule breaks
Choose working hours
Back end and front end schedule edit
Shortcode integration option
Automatic appointment page setup
Display weekly schedule
Display Monthly schedule
Limit advanced booking
Gravatar support
Simple appointment manager
Transaction manager
Includes setup wizard
Custom color labels for appointments
Calendar style options
Auto-fill for repeat clients
Login with Facebook
Login with Twitter
Login with Google+
Login with WordPress
Integrates with MarketPress gateways
Require payment or deposits
Fixed or percentage deposit
Google Calendar sync
Appointment reminders
Manual appointment booking
Automatically remove unpaid appointments
Monthly calendar widget
Service provider widget
Services widget
Tutorials and FAQ included
130+ custom filter and action hooks
20 included Add-ons
Set multiple break times
Custom appointments+ profile fields
Define appointment locations
Add services and workers locations
Google Maps integration
Integrated notifications system
Once you signup for a Pro or Premium plan you will see the Appointments+ plugin in your list of available plugins.
To start, select "Activate" to activate the Appointments+ plugin.
Once you Activate the plugin you will see a menu appear on the Menu Bar labeled Appointments.
You will see three sub-menus appear when you click on the menu item. We will tackle each separately and in order.
Appointments
Clicking Appointments brings you to the hub of your appointments list. You will see that your appointments will be separated by status: Active, Pending, Completed and Removed. You can view each by clicking on their respective links, and each page will show the Client and Service basic info as below. At the top of the page you will see an Add New button, just like you use to create a new page or post. Click that and you can Add a new appointment manually to your calendar.
The New Appointment Menu is pretty self explanatory. There is a place for the client’s information, the Service information (that will populate from the menus you fill in later) and a place for notes. Last but not least you can set the status before Saving. There is a built in tutorial that covers this as well, I will show you where to find that, just in-case you have any questions or forget something.
next up…
Transactions
Here you will see your transactions if you are taking payments or deposits. These are also grouped: Recent, Pending and Future. Each accessible by clicking their respective links. You cannot manually add a transaction, the plugin will only record what is recorded through PayPal.
And now the meat of this beast…
Settings
The Settings menu will greet you with a Tutorial. You should pay attention to that 🙂
It will tell you what you need to know about setting up the plugin and the tabs you see here. Most are pretty easy to understand and the plugin options are very well annotated, so you should have no trouble. We can pop through and summarize them here, one by one, but I will draw your attention to the FAQ tab first.
FAQ
Here is where you will find info on everything you need in this plugin, ready for immediate access! The TWO most important pieces of information on this page, for those who are just installing or learning how to use the plugin, are the two links at the top. These will start (or restart) the tutorials on the Settings menu options and Entering and Editing Appointments.
Now, let’s backtrack. Starting off at the first tab:
General
These settings are the heart and soul of your setup. Pay special attention to the General Settings box at the top of the page. Especially the Time base value. Time Base the most important parameter of Appointments+. It is the minimum time that you can select for your appointments. Everything time related will work off of this value. The remaining boxes allow you to set your
Display: create an appointment page, it’s display, client information boxes and a place to add Custom CSS.
Client Accessibility: you can choose whether or not to require login before scheduling
Payment Settings: choose whether you will accept payments
Notification Settings: option to set up confirmation and reminder emails for client and/or providers
Performance Settings: Caching options
Working Hours
Set your hours of operation and Break Times. Think Business Hours and ‘Out to Lunch‘. You can even specify different hours for different service providers. Makes it easy to keep track of differing schedules!
Exceptions
Days off, holidays, scheduled maintenance, etc. You can add them all here. You can also define working days that are normally non-work days (i.e. a particular Sunday). These are also able to be set per service provider.
Services
What do you do?! What do you provide?! This is where you lay it all out. Set a capacity, price and even a description page.
Service Providers
It is not required that you have more than one person available doing what gets done, but if you do, here is where you keep track of them all. You can even add Additional fees and assign more than one service to a provider. Even attach them to a Bio page. Note: this tab will not populate until you have at least one service listed in the Services tab.
Shortcodes
Heaps of Shortcodes for your use. Insert provider or client specific tables, dropdown of services, table for appointment scheduling, monthly views, social login pagination, list all upcoming appointments, PayPal and a couple of parameters for those.
There is a new shortcode currently in beta (development) that you can try out on your site, which combines service, provider and calendar selection into one AJAX-powered interface. Please let us know in the forums if you have any issues with it:
[app_combo]
To use the above shortcode, first enable the AJAX shortcode addon under the Addons tab in the plugin settings.
Logs
Keep up with what is happening by checking your Logs. This nifty tab is where you will find updates on everything that happens on your site. Status changes, transactions and the like.
And that’s it! Well not really. You will need to download and install to see the details. This plugin is spectacularly annotated and contains loads of helpful information along the setup process! Enjoy!
