New Free Appointment Booking from Square

All right, Canadian small business owners, this is an announcement that came in my inbox this morning. I absolutely had to make a video about this. Now, if you're familiar with Square, the payment system that allows you to take online payments, they've evolved a lot over the last couple of years from just being able to use a mobile app to take payments to now be able to do online invoicing and now released here to Canada the ability to book appointments and also take payments for appointments. And what I'm going to do is I just went in and looked at it briefly. I'm impressed with what I saw so far, and I just stopped and I said, hey, we're going to do a video, we're going to go and look at this together. So here we are, we're in our Square account. And again, I'm going to emphasize that this solution, completely free for one calendar. So if you're a, a single entrepreneur, or maybe you're a financial advisor, you're just independent in your business and you just need one calendar, you You don't need one for your team. They do offer that for a paid version, but the free for one calendar option here, completely free for life, no matter what you do. So come in here, we're going to go to appointments. Now, how it all works is it allows you to set up what are called your services. Okay. So once you're in here, you're going to see the menu across the top of the page here. So we're going to go and we're just going to follow along. Now you could have followed these steps here that we had in place. Now I created services. Next would be Create a test appointment. So what we're going to do is we're going to say, okay, let's go to our calendar. Okay, so now it shows us our calendar here and we can say— excuse me— we can customize our availability. So one of the cool things with online calendar booking, and it's been proven, that if you give somebody the option to pick a time and date that works for their calendar, they're more likely to show up than it is that if you just go back and forth playing email or phone tag to set an appointment. So Customizing your availability. When do you want to show availability to people who come and look at your calendar? Now by default, it's going to give you a Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 time slot here. So for the sake of simplicity, that's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to leave that in there as well. And then you can go in here, you can create an appointment. But what we're going to do is we're going to go through the different steps in here and we're going to say, okay, online booking. Now what we're going to do is we're going to set up our booking site. So we're going to edit our book, our business details here. And this is going to take us into looking at all the different booking settings so that what it looks like online is exactly the way you want it perceived. So your business name, the nickname. So in our case, because it's me, I'm going to have my name in there. And this is not what we are here. This is because we have this for a different account. So we're going to go in here, business bio. So Blue Cow Marketing is a Full-service business marketing firm located in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. And now you can obviously write a bigger bio if you want. It's going to pull in the information. So if you already have a Square account, then this information will most likely be put in here. Email, there's everything, there's our website, all that stuff is there. Perfect. I'm just gonna actually make that the secure link. I'm gonna go www as well. The logo, all that, uh, you can have a background, your business hours, all that kind of stuff. Banking information's all in here. Uh, everything looks good, uh, from my— oh, Twitter is invalid. Okay, so what do we got here? I think we're just gonna go with— I think that's what they want. That's gonna appease the saving people here. Uh, so then you got set up our booking site. So you've got a URL here. Now it's going to give you a big long URL that you can use, but you've got options for going to the booking site. You can do the website embed, which is going to give you the option to embed, uh, the page. So if you want to preview as a sidebar, so using something like WordPress, you can click on this. It's going to pop up and show you what it looks like. Here, right? So we got two options in here. We got our free consults and our marketing consultation, all that kind of stuff. Um, we've got some different options in here for advanced, so we can create a new widget and so forth. But really, um, under your visibility and display, you can disable the online booking. Maybe you want to turn it off. You can put your services in order. And when I say my services, that's what we're going to show you here quickly. Now I'm going through this pretty fast because obviously this is just a kind of a quick, hey, this service is out there, you should go check it out. Because it's free, I recommend that you at least sign up, play with it if you don't have an online booking system. Now we use several different ones over the years because with our clients they use different ones and we want to use them. We use ScheduleOnce for certain things. We've got Calendly, which is another good one. And I'm going to give this one its run for its money and see what it's all about. But what we've done here is we put in two items, two service items. We got our marketing consultation, which allows us to give you the name, the description, the duration of the length, extra time if you want to block off extra time at the end of the appointment. So we have an hour and a half, so maybe we want to go and say, okay, we're going to put another 30 minutes in there. That way it doesn't bump it up against other bookings. And then we've got different pricing structures and models. We got a fixed price, starting at, free, price varies, call us, or blank. Okay, because we are charging for this marketing consultation, it's actually a 1.5-hour, We're going to put the price in there. Okay, and then do you want it available to the clients when they book? So would you want them to see it? Because you can have different types of service appointments here that maybe you're just doing manually booking and you don't want them to be able to book it online. So we're just going to save that. And it's easy to just go ahead and create new services. And then if you got multiple team members, then you can add different employees. Now keeping in mind, this free version is only for one employee, one single calendar. Um, but if you have multiple teams and you want to pay for that, I think it's like, uh, well, I think it says it here in the email. Let's just look quickly. Uh, no, it doesn't say it there. Uh, but I think it's like $80 a month for multiple employees and everything like that. Uh, I'll be honest with you, there are cheaper solutions when you're looking at team calendars. But if you're using Square for everything, you got multiple people, maybe you're, you know, like a hair salon, you want to be able to— people to book appointments on there, then this is another great option. I know the, the hairdresser that cuts my son's hair, they use Square to do payments. So this would make a great option for us to be able to go book appointments online. Hint, hint, wink, wink, uh, that's on there. So let's go ahead and look at the settings. So now when we go in here, what we need to do is we want to be able to have it look at your calendar, right? Because we went and put our availability in there, but how does it know what you're doing?, and that's because you need to connect a different calendar to this system. Uh, most cases you're using something like Google Calendar, and I strongly recommend that Google Calendar is a great option for you. So where do you want to accept these appointments? At your business, at your customer's location, at both locations, or phone only? Um, so you've got some options in there. Uh, the reservation guarantee, uh, so business automatically accepts all appointment requests or business must accept or decline appointment requests. I recommend doing this one if you are doing a consultation type business or you have potential that you may not have your calendar updated. This is a great option because you'll get an email that says, hey, there's been a booking request, click here to accept or decline. Giving the clients options to schedule, reschedule, or cancel their appointments. And now here what we're gonna do is we're gonna link my Google Calendar. So I'm gonna click on this. I'm gonna say log into Google. And it's really quite simple to do this. If you're using G Suite or anything like that for your email, then you've already got a Google Calendar, and having it all linked up is a great option. So choose linking option. We're going to import and export, so we're going to do that one. We're not just going to do import because what we want is— the difference between this is if we do import and export, it'll look at your Google Calendar, which should be your main calendar. It will say, okay, what's available? Let's bring that into this calendar. And vice versa, if somebody books in here, you want it to put into your Google Calendar. You don't want to have to be managing between two. So we're going to go import/export. And what calendar? That's my main one. We're going to go ahead and click continue and select where you want the calendar to export to. We're going to put it to there. We're just waiting for it to connect up. There we go, successfully linked. Pretty easy, pretty simple for all this to happen. And there it is right there, ready to go. Now let's go down to the settings for the online scheduling. Appointments are scheduled on the half hour, on the hour, or on the quarter hour. Okay, so by this you mean if you've got like 15-minute increments, then you can put it on there, or the half hour. Um, we're gonna actually— I'm gonna go quarter hour just because I got a lot of clients that like to do that. Appointments must be made so far in advance. So we're gonna say, okay, you can't book an appointment no more than, um, let's do 8 hours in advance. Cutoff time: allow clients to cancel or reschedule. So this means that if they want to cancel or reschedule, they can't do it X amount of hours before, right? So they're not going to be like 10 minutes before the, the appointment, they're going to cancel on you. Okay, so what we're going to do here is we're going to go and say 3 hours in here. And appointments can't be scheduled so far in advance, so by default it's giving us a year. I'm going to go ahead and put in 90 days. Allow multiple services to be booked online, so allow people to book more than one. And the fake it filter, this is interesting. I've not Again, I've not seen these settings until we've done this video. I love the name, the Fake It filter. Do not apply any filters. So slightly busy, moderately busy, extremely busy. Why do they put this in here? They put it in there because if you're a new business and let's say you want somebody to come and book a consult with you and they look at your calendar and for some reason you just don't have anything going on that week, right? There's nothing in your calendar. You don't want them to see like 500 availabilities for the week. I mean, that's extreme, but you don't want them to see that. So it allows you to say, okay, only show 25% of my openings or 40% or 50%. And vice versa. I'm going to leave mine off for now because my calendar is fairly busy, so there's no chance that that's going to hurt anything. So we're going to go ahead and hit save. All right, so once it's in there, let's look at the next thing. We've got payments and cancellations. So, um, booking without no-show protect or protection. Yes, that's right. So required cancellation policy. So if you are charging for appointments, you could put your, your required cancellation policy in here, and you can also to add to this. Uh, booking with no-show protection. So maybe you want to have a cancellation fee, so you can have the option in here to do that. So fee for each service or a flat rate fee, you've got the option to do that. Or you can do requires prepayment. Okay, so if somebody's booking online, they have to pay before the actual appointment. So that's what we have in place here. Okay, so I'm going to go no-show protection and we'll keep it at that. And communication, So I'm gonna save that option. And to be quite honest with you, in looking at other solutions, especially free solutions, I'm impressed so far with what Square has put together here. I think they're gonna give a lot of the other solutions, even Calendly, a big run for their money by having this. Uh, and then piggybacking that with the idea for online invoicing, all the virtual terminals, gateways, everything, like, well done Square. Well played. So communication, email and text. Message reminders. So you've got email reminders 1 day or 1 hour before. You got different appointments down here. Select the email from the list to customize. Okay, so you can go ahead and choose from the list here how you customize these. It's not really showing me how to do that, um, which you can change here. What's the emails that we sent? The language, the business, you can change here. That's fine. I do not include marketing or promotional materials, so I'm not seeing an edit button, right? That's something a little wonky at the moment, but, uh, that's neither here nor there. That's not a big deal. History, uh, and then you got refer a friend here. So, um, if you gotta sign up, then go ahead and sign up. Now what I'm gonna do is when I post this video, I'm gonna put our referral link here. If you like this video, down below this in YouTube or Facebook, wherever you saw this and you want to sign up, I would love it if you just showed some love paid it forward, use my link here, uh, and then they'll give me a, a kind of little pat on the back kind of thing, uh, if you do sign up, um, for any of their paid systems, uh, that they have. So, um, yeah, that's, that's the calendar. Let's quickly, before we do anything, I'm just gonna go ahead here and open this up and open up in a new tab. I wanna see what this looks like. Again, not seen this yet. So here we go. Here's the, the booking thing. Oh, that's pretty cool. So it's got your logo, it's got your hours of operation, your, your address, your contact information, your social links. Uh, you can say book an appointment. Come in here. Let's just go ahead and see what this looks like. So we're going to say free consult, book now. Okay, so we're going to pick our time zone, which is, uh, this one there. So Atlantic, that's great. And then what's some availability? So we can look at the different days. So here, uh, let's just say 9:30. Now you fill in your information, you book the appointment. Pretty straightforward. Uh, I do like it, I do like it. So yeah, If you're looking to get some online booking options for you and your business, you don't have it, you even want to do some online payments, or you got a Square account, this is here now. Go to the link that is below this video and check it out. And thanks for watching. If you like this video, if you're seeing it on YouTube, like, subscribe, follow, share, do whatever you want. Get up, do a happy dance. You know what? These type of things, this is the way the business needs to go. Online bookings, online payments, it's fantastic. And again, thank you for watching this video. It's my pleasure to put it together, and I hope you have a great day.