February 2012
3 posts
3 tags
Gutter Installation and Cleaning
Imagine you’re on the job, up on the ladder, in the middle of a gutter cleaning or repair, and you get a phone call about scheduling an appointment for another client. Since you’re attentive to the needs of your clients, you come down off the ladder, walk to your truck, and pull out your planner to schedule an appointment for the following Monday. You end up chatting with your client...
5 tags
Group Bookings / Multiple Seats
At ScheduleThing we cater to a wide variety of businesses and industries. In doing so we have had to make our software flexible and capable of handling a number of different booking types. One of the ways in which we maintain this flexibility is by offering group booking or multiple seats. Are you teaching a class that has room for multiple students? Or giving a tour for a group of people? With...
3 tags
Real Estate Agents
If you’re in the real estate business, you know that your job’s success hinges on two things: your ability to successfully manage your listings and your ability to keep your showings organized to maintain your reliable reputation. Closing the sale is important, and getting overwhelmed by the number of listings or by last-minute cancellations or schedule changes could make all the...
January 2012
1 post
4 tags
Accountant / Tax Preparation
Tax season is coming! You know what that means. Every hour of your day will be jam packed and micromanaged.
Many CPA firms are still stuck in the dark ages when it comes to using technology to improve their in-office efficiency. Don’t get bogged down by the huge surge of clients and ditch the old desk calendar. Get online and let ScheduleThing manage your life for you.
Online scheduling
...
December 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Solar
Everyone is going green, and you couldn’t be happier. Not only do you feel passionately about the environment, but business is good and you’re keeping busy. Whether you work for a consulting company or a installation business, you know how important it is to keep a schedule during the busy seasons. Phone calls start rolling in and you want to fit as many clients in as possible without...
2 tags
Home Inspection
A house is a huge investment—one of the biggest we make in our lifetime. As an inspector, you know this means that a buyer wants to know everything. They want to know about every leaky pipe, moldy wall and sneaky rodent before they shell out thousands of dollars. Nobody wants to buy a home and find out later they need tons of maintenance.
That’s where you come in. Potential...
November 2011
4 posts
4 tags
Catering
If you’re in the catering business, you’re passionate about food. You’ve got the cooking and baking down, but when things get crazy, the last thing you want to worry about is your schedule. Unfortunately, a small scheduling mix up can throw off your whole routine. Whether you cater large events or small events, your reputation can be badly damaged by one scheduling mistake. As a caterer you need...
5 tags
Limousine Services
Delivering high quality service. Finding new clients. Booking pickups. Exceeding expectations. Limousine rental is a business based on impeccable image and reliable results. As business grows, however, maintaining your image and reliability can become a challenge. Double-booking a limo or writing down the wrong reservation time chips away at your squeaky clean record, and any negative feedback can...
3 tags
Tree Service
The tree business is tricky. Some of your jobs may be planned well in advance, like your clients who’ve been sick of their slowly rotting tree for weeks. Others will strike with little or no warning—like a tree that falls on a power or through the fence of a house. Either way, it’s your job to be prepared for any scenario, and that means keeping an organized schedule. If you...
3 tags
Vacation House Rental
Summer is always a guaranteed busy season. Phone calls from eager vacationers start pouring in as early as January to book houses, rooms and timeshares for their big summer plans. Everyone’s ready to shed the winter layers and cash out on their accumulated sick days to book vacation plans with friends and family. It takes a lot of time and a lot great deal planning, and there is always...
October 2011
5 posts
2 tags
How To Use Our Booking Widget
At ScheduleThing, we’re all about giving you more ways to connect with clients and make it easy to manage your appointment or reservation scheduling. Now, you can add our new booking widget directly to your website so clients can book appointments from there without navigating to the booking site. Customers simply click on the widget to view appointment types and available times to make the...
5 tags
Parent-Teacher Conferences
It’s that time of year again! Teachers, you know what we’re talking about. Fall is in full swing, you’ve had your students for several months now, and it’s time to meet with their parents. You send a letter home with your students and wait for it to be returned with the parents’ preferred time slot. Problem is, five moms send back a request for the same spot. Now you...
6 tags
Yard work and Lanscaping Services
If you’re like most yard services, your business probably started as a part-time gig and eventually grew up to become a full-time business. What was the key to your success? Probably referrals. If you’ve experienced growing pains associated with your yard service — and we bet you have — here’s a tip to help you manage your growth:
Sign up for ScheduleThing
Every...
4 tags
Counseling Services
Working as a counselor, your patients come first. They are the reason you chose this career in the first place. You enjoy helping people, and you want to ensure that your patients are getting quality service and your full attention.
This can be a difficult task when you have so many phone calls coming in. Cancellations, last minute appointments and first timers all seem to come rolling in at the...
4 tags
Animal Grooming
Working in the grooming business, you know how important it is to keep a schedule. You get to the shop early in the morning, check your calendar and see a full day of shampooing, clipping and pampering is ahead of you. You’re completely swamped, and the last thing you need is to be interrupted by constant phone calls. There are just too many dogs and too little time. You’re rushing...
September 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Auto Repair
Oil change at 9:00, brake check at 9:30, another oil change at…3:00. Working at the shop, daily business is hit or miss. These time gaps aren’t unfamiliar. People usually won’t call you until they have a problem. They get into their car, realize their “Change Oil” light is glowing or their brakes are struggling, and they drive over to see if you’re busy. If you...
3 tags
Financial Planning
As a successful financial planner, you enjoy being attentive to the needs of each of your clients. However, with each client’s unique goals, risk profiles and contact preferences, your stress level grows in tandem with your client base. You’re great at balancing a budget, but sometimes balancing your workload is a challenge of its own.
If managing your office is becoming an...
July 2011
7 posts
2 tags
Dog Walker
Your neighbor is a busy guy, so he asks you to walk his dog twice a week. You’ve had some extra time recently, and you love his dog. Then he refers you to the girl downstairs who needs someone for evenings. She refers you to her mom, and before you know it, you have a business on your hands.
What is an entrepreneur to do when you have other obligations to keep track of? School, work, kids...
3 tags
Dance Instruction
Dancing is a great way to spend the evening, but if you’re an instructor, finding the time to dance with your favorite partner, family, and friends can be a difficult task. You are expected to teach everyone before you have the chance to enjoy it yourself. Ever since the rise of ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and ‘America’s Best Dance Crew,’ you haven’t had a...
2 tags
Tutoring
Your tutoring business probably started pretty small with a few referrals from friends or neighbors. In any case, word has gotten out that you can bring an F to an A in 3 weeks flat, and your client list is beginning to grow. Here’s the problem: people are busy, and you’re dealing with cancellations and rescheduling which has your head spinning. Managing your schedule shouldn’t...
4 tags
Bed and Breakfast
If you own a Bed and Breakfast, you know how important it is to keep an accurate schedule. Organizing reservations and managing cancellations or date changes can be an unwelcome challenge in your cozy abode. ScheduleThing’s online reservation system offers an easy-to-read calendar view so you’re always aware of vacancies or full weekends. ScheduleThing handles multi-day reservations...
3 tags
Doctor
When you’re working at the office, you know how important it is to manage your patients. They’re the reason you became a practitioner in the first place. Their health is important to you, and you want them to feel that they can rely on you any time of the year. This can be difficult when the office gets busy.
You know how it goes. You come into the office in the morning, and your...
7 tags
Hair Salon
If you’re a stylist or a barber, you know about the schedule game. Your life revolves around them. 12:00 - cut and color, 1:30 - child’s cut, 2:00 - blow dry, 2:30 - bang trim, 3:00 - Highlight, 4:00 - men’s cut … sound familiar?
Every day you come into work, and the first thing you do is check your schedule. Some days you’re booked solid, other days you’re...
4 tags
Child care
Child care specialists and parents alike know the value of keeping a schedule. There is nothing worse than getting excited for a night out only to discover you cant find a sitter. It’s equally as frustrating for a sitter to find they’ve missed an opportunity to make some extra money because they didn’t have enough notice.
A utility that allows parents to view their...
June 2011
8 posts
5 tags
Personal Trainer
Let’s face it: when given the choice between going to the gym or holding down the couch, most of us choose the latter. Working out always sounds like a good idea, but it is easier said than done. Most people are busy. We “want” to exercise because we know it’s good for us, but we don’t have anything motivating us. That’s where you come in. As a personal trainer,...
4 tags
Videographers
In the video profession, managing equipment and crew in an effective manner is critical to the success of the organization. One scheduling snafu or miscommunication, and one of your teams may end up with double the amount of lighting sets while the other arrives at location only to find themselves (and their subjects) in the dark. The time spent correcting the error leads to a longer day of...
9 tags
Nail Salon
You’re a salon owner or a nail technician. You rely on a lot of walk-in business, and throughout the day you have a steady flow of customers. This is nothing you can’t handle. Suddenly 5:00 rolls around, and your steady flow has turned into a flood.
The last thing you want to do is turn business away, but you don’t have the man power to provide service to all of these customers....
New Features: Calendar Integration Updates
New Feature: Calendar Invites
ScheduleThing users may already be familiar with our custom email notifications which are sent to you and your client whenever an appointment is booked. Now, those notifications will come with an attached calendar invitation for easy integration into your iCal or Google Calendar. Simply confirm the reservation in the same way you would any other event in your personal...
4 tags
Attorneys
You know the problem too well. You’re meeting with a client, and the phone calls start rolling in. First time inquiries, follow ups and appointments hit you all at once. The worst part is, this is only your first meeting of the day. It’s impossible to direct your full attention to a client when you’re worried about penciling everyone in.
Or maybe you’re at a larger firm,...
3 tags
Music Instruction
There’s nothing quite like teaching someone how to play an instrument. You’ve been playing for years, but nothing makes you happier than witnessing that moment when your student just gets it. Or maybe you’re a singing instructor. After months of struggling with the high notes, you finally see your student sing in front of an audience…and nail it. You can’t beat that...
3 tags
Wedding Planners
As a wedding planner, keeping your cool while managing the details and stress of others’ events is a must. You book the venue, order the cake, send the invites and pick up the bouquets. You manage the bridezillas, motivate the slackers and correct the mistakes and mishaps, all with a cool demeanor and a smile on your face.
Whether you have one client or a dozen, you know how busy each...
4 tags
Photographers
Whether you’re a photography hobbyist looking to get into the business or an established photographer with a packed agenda and a handful of assistants, you can count on ScheduleThing to keep your photo shoots in clear focus and free from disaster.
Ideal for booking both employees and resources for a specific job, ScheduleThing’s online scheduling software lets you pick and choose...
May 2011
7 posts
4 tags
New Feature: Print View
Let’s face it: we all can’t memorize our schedule everyday, and we don’t have time to keep checking the computer to remind us - especially those of us who travel during the day. We need to have our schedule on hand and on-the-go. ScheduleThing’s new print view feature comes to the rescue, giving you the ability to generate a simple and easy-to-read list of appointments that is painless to print...
2 tags
New Feature: Calendar View
While seeing a list of your appointments is great, it doesn’t give you a good idea of what your week will look like. For example, by just glancing at a list, you cannot tell that your Wednesday is filled to the brim, while you have the whole afternoon open on Thursday.
ScheduleThing’s new and convenient Calendar View lets you see your entire week with just a quick skim. Furthermore, it allows...
3 tags
New Feature: Resource Autoselect
Resource Autoselect will randomly select a resource for appointments that don’t require a specific one. For example, let’s say you run a salon. If a client doesn’t prefer any specific stylist, you can set ScheduleThing’s salon schedule software to select one for them, at random. The only thing more beautiful than your newly styled client is our automated appointment system’s ability to...
2 tags
New Feature: Crew Size
Say you run a landscaping business. Certain jobs, like mowing a lawn, can be done by one person, but sometimes you have those tough jobs that need more manpower, like chopping down a tree. That’s why ScheduleThing has implemented a “Crew Size” feature which allows you to define the number of employees or resources needed for a particular job.
To implement this feature in the automated scheduling...
3 tags
New Feature: Resource Blackouts
It’s an unfortunate situation when a customer books an appointment and shows up for it only to find the doors locked and lights shut off. You’re closed for vacation and no one informed the customer! This situation is damaging to your company’s reputation and undesirable to say the least. At ScheduleThing, we understand the importance of integrity, which is why we are building web-based...
3 tags
New Feature: Lunch Breaks
Everybody needs a lunch break, whether you’re brown-bagging it or going out to eat. Having to go without a lunch break can lead to unhappy employees and potentially unsatisfied customers (running a hair salon with a sandwich in hand is hardly professional). With our salon scheduling software, you can now define a time slot for lunch breaks during the day. ScheduleThing’s web-based scheduling...
3 tags
New Feature: Custom Notifications
Your business could be a little funky, or maybe it’s very prim and proper. Regardless of your style, automatic messages just don’t match the voice of your business. Now there’s a solution for that!
The new and improved ScheduleThing allows you to completely customize the notifications sent to your customers. This means that you can change the wording of your message to better reflect...
October 2010
3 posts
5 tags
4 tags
ScheduleThing's Huge New Feature Set!
The ScheduleThing crew has been hard at work incorporating feedback from users to make ScheduleThing the most powerful appointment reservation system around. We’re excited to raise the curtain on the latest version of ScheduleThing. Here are a few of the great new features available now:
Multi-Day Reservations Have a client that wants to book a facility or vacation rental or check out...
Simple Conference Room Scheduling
Schedulething is a powerful tool for any kind of online booking. It makes the most complex reservations easy - even those that require the availability of multiple resources. This post, however, will focus on a simple but common use of Schedulething: scheduling meeting rooms in your workplace or facility.
Scheduling the conference room at your office is a very common task, but often one that...