Online booking with vcita lets clients schedule with your business directly from your website, your client portal, emails, or social media pages! To make sure that online booking is convenient for you, as well as for your clients, vCita's online booking options let you control scheduling settings, booking policies, the text displayed on the booking page, and more.

Accessing and Enabling Online Booking

Start in your vcita account and navigate to Settings > Online Booking Options.

Booking Options and Booking Limits

The Booking options & limits section has settings to help you maintain order in your calendar by providing options that avoid last-minute bookings, give you control over how you accept appointments, and more. 

Appointment Acceptance Method

• Accept appointments:
  • Manual: you will need to manually accept the appointment in your vCita. Once accepted, a confirmation email is sent to the client.
  • Automatic: Appointments booked online for an available time slot will be entered in your calendar and confirmed automatically.
  • Combined: New clients who have never booked with you before will send a request that you will need to approve. Existing client appointments are confirmed automatically.

• Advance notification: Set the minimum amount of advance notice you will need for an appointment to avoid last-minute bookings. For example, you may need 24 hours' notice of a new appointment. Conversely, if you'd like to allow last-minute booking, you can lower the time requirement.

• Limit future bookings: Set how far ahead of time clients may book an appointment. Options vary from one day in advance to one year in advance. When Not set is selected, there is no limit on how far ahead clients may book. 

Booking Policies

The Booking policies options allow you to set rules and policies for rescheduling and canceling appointments. You may also compose a message text that will be displayed to your clients immediately before they book an appointment online. 

• Cancellations and Reschedules: Lets you set the period of time that must elapse between rescheduling or cancelling an appointment and the time of the original appointment. Options vary from Always (no limit) to 4 weeks.
  After the set time limit is reached, clients will not be able to reschedule or cancel the appointment online.
• Booking Policy Text: This is the place to describe your policy in regards to cancellations, reschedules, arriving late and so on. You may also use it for instructions, terms or any other notes for your clients. The booking policy text will be displayed to clients right before submitting their appointment request, as well as on the appointment screen on the client portal. 

• Terms of service: Select the checkbox if you want clients to accept your own Terms of Service before they book an appointment. When you choose this option, you will be prompted to enter the URL pointing to your Terms of Service.

Online Scheduler Display Options

The Display options settings let you customize the display and flow of your online scheduler - the tool that your clients will be using to book with you. 

• Display of Service categories: If you use categories to organize your services, those categories can be expanded or collapsed by default. 
• Display or promote Packages: If you have any packages available for purchase, you can determine how they will appear on your online scheduler.
• Scheduling order: Choose whether clients first select a service and then the preferred staff member, or vice versa. If you would prefer not to allow the client to choose a staff member, you can enable that option per service in Settings > My Services. 
• Display time-slots: Time slots can be divided up into morning, afternoon and evening slots, or show all at once.

• Service menu title: Enter a line of text to be displayed above your Service Menu (See below).