Appointments - Opening Times & Availability

There are two elements related to availability in the appointment diary.

Setting Practice Opening Times

Opening times are the actual hours of the practice. They act as a ‘default’ availability schedule for any new optometrist, and will also provide the availability for the 'All Opticians' setting in the 1 Day/7 Day/Month views.

Click on the in the top left of the screen. Go to Maintain > Appointments > Opening Times.

• Tick the days that the practice is open for business.
• Select the day from the drop down.
• Tick the AM/PM box if the practice closes for lunch.
• Using the drop down boxes select the appropriate opening and closing times.
• If all of the practice days keep the same hours click on the button.
• Set the length of time for which you want to retain appointment information on the system.
• Appointments will only be removed from the system if you click on the Clear Old Appointments button. It is not automatic.

Staff Scheduling

Staff Scheduling allows you to set up optometrists’ availability and custom hours as well as apply templates.

• Click on the in the top left of the screen.
• Go to Maintain > Appointments > Staff Scheduling.

• Select the optometrist.
• Select the display interval for their appointments in the diary screens.
• Select a day to set up scheduling for.

• You can set the day as either Practice Hours, Unavailable or Custom Hours.
  • Practice Hours uses the default hours set on the Opening Times maintenance.
  • Unavailable marks the optometrist as unavailable all day.
  • Custom Hours allows you to set availability within and outside of practice hours.

Setting Custom Hours

• Select custom hours.
• Use the boxes to set the optometrists’ hours for the chosen day.
• If they have a lunch break, use the AM/PM check box to enable you to split the day into two.
• Remember to configure the end time to the end of the last appointment, else you will not be able to book it.

Setting Templates

You can have up to two templates set for an optometrist on any day.

• Select the first template from the drop down box.
• Use the boxes next to the template to set the times that the template is active for.
• If two templates are required select the second template and use the boxes next to it to set up availability.

Setting Recurrence

You can use this feature to recur a single days schedule throughout the diary.

This saves you time and enables you to set scheduled days up into the future.

• Click the Recurrence button.

• Use the dropdown boxes to select the date range for the recurrence. It is important you remember to do this step, else you will end up changing nothing.
• Use the radio buttons to select the type of recurrence during that date range.

• Daily – The schedule will be replicated every x number of days or every week day.

• Weekly – The schedule will be replicated for each of the selected days every x number of weeks during the date range selected.

• Monthly – The schedule will be replicated on the xth day of the month during the date range selected.

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