Schedule Your Time Better With A New Appointment Calendar
http://www.computerslive.net/articles/1125/1/Schedule-Your-Time-Better-With-A-New-Appointment-Calendar/Page1.html
Art Gib
Art Gib writes for Double Twenty Productions (http://www.d20.com/matt-wolf.html) a game-making and storytelling development company founded by Emmy-award winning creator and producer Matt Wolf. By Art Gib
Published on 04/11/2008
Make your small business more efficient and profitable with a simple and accessible appointment calendar.
Whether you are a lawyer, doctor, hair stylist, event coordinator or some other small business owner with appointments to make and keep, your business would probably run smoother if you used a new kind of appointment calendar for scheduling your time.
If your business is up and running, you probably already have a some way to schedule patients, appointments or meetings into the day, but there are a couple new features on some appointment calendars that make them easier to use and save you time.
Patient Self-Scheduling
In most offices, the receptionist spends a lot of time just scheduling appointments. One of the easiest ways to save your office staff a little time is to invest in an appointment calendar that patients or customers can also view online and use to schedule their own appointments. This will eliminate the lengthy process of coordinating the personal schedules of patients with open time-slots in your office.
Accessibility
Web based appointment calendars are convenient because you can access them from any web browser. This means that you can view your schedule for the next day or the next week wherever you are and you'll be able to work other things into your schedule more easily.
Color Coding
Color coding is one of the clearest ways to organize information. For example, if there are three or four doctors working in the same office, assign each doctor a different color and they can see their appointment schedule at a glance rather than reading through every entry to find their name. Or, if you are the only person running your business, you can use color coding to tag different kinds of tasks instead.
Automatic Email Reminders
Instead of having someone hunt you down to deliver appointment reminders, have them sent right to you via automatic email reminders. These reminders can also be sent to your customers to save your receptionist more time on the phone and to decrease the number of missed appointments.
Recurring Appointments
If you have meetings or appointments that fall on the same time every day, week or month, good appointment calendars can save you the work of manually entering them in by scheduling recurring appointments for as long as you want with a few short clicks.
If you do find a company that provides appointment calendars with all of these features, make sure that they are affordable and flexible. For example, you want to avoid lengthy contracts and costly set-up fees.
If your business is up and running, you probably already have a some way to schedule patients, appointments or meetings into the day, but there are a couple new features on some appointment calendars that make them easier to use and save you time.
Patient Self-Scheduling
In most offices, the receptionist spends a lot of time just scheduling appointments. One of the easiest ways to save your office staff a little time is to invest in an appointment calendar that patients or customers can also view online and use to schedule their own appointments. This will eliminate the lengthy process of coordinating the personal schedules of patients with open time-slots in your office.
Accessibility
Web based appointment calendars are convenient because you can access them from any web browser. This means that you can view your schedule for the next day or the next week wherever you are and you'll be able to work other things into your schedule more easily.
Color Coding
Color coding is one of the clearest ways to organize information. For example, if there are three or four doctors working in the same office, assign each doctor a different color and they can see their appointment schedule at a glance rather than reading through every entry to find their name. Or, if you are the only person running your business, you can use color coding to tag different kinds of tasks instead.
Automatic Email Reminders
Instead of having someone hunt you down to deliver appointment reminders, have them sent right to you via automatic email reminders. These reminders can also be sent to your customers to save your receptionist more time on the phone and to decrease the number of missed appointments.
Recurring Appointments
If you have meetings or appointments that fall on the same time every day, week or month, good appointment calendars can save you the work of manually entering them in by scheduling recurring appointments for as long as you want with a few short clicks.
If you do find a company that provides appointment calendars with all of these features, make sure that they are affordable and flexible. For example, you want to avoid lengthy contracts and costly set-up fees.