Introducing text message appointment reminders to clients! Now, in addition to sending email reminders, you can send appointment reminders right to your clients’ mobile phones via text message (SMS). Email reminders have proven to reduce no-shows by 35% and, with three out of four adults sending and receiving text messages today, it’s critical to reach your clients wherever they are. You might consider setting up an email reminder to be sent one or two days before appointments and a text message reminder to be sent six or twelve hours before appointments.

To set up text message reminders, go to Messages > Automatic Messages, add an ‘Appointment reminder’ and select the text message / SMS template. You can even customize the language in the text message, including placeholders to dynamically change the message.

We’re releasing text message reminders as a ‘beta’ feature, so please let us know if you have any feedback on the service. The feature is free while in beta and — because we pay a third-party SMS service to ensure text messages are reliably sent every time — will be a premium feature after the beta ends. If you choose to use this feature at the end of the beta, it will cost only $3/month on the single-schedule plan, $5/month on the 5-schedule plan and $8/month on the 10-schedule plan.

Thank you to everyone who requested this feature!

Now you can dynamically add provider names to email templates — such as appointment confirmations and reminders — so your clients know who their appointment will be with. To include the provider’s name in appointment-related emails to clients, just add the {provider name} placeholder to include the first name of the staff member or the {provider full name} placeholder to include the first and last name of the staff member.

For example, take the following sentence in the ‘appointment confirmation’ email template: “Your appointment with {provider name} on {day} at {time} is now booked.” If the appointment is with staff member Emily, the client email will read “Your appointment with Emily on Friday, July 15 at 10:00am is now booked.”

Check out this blog post to learn more about using placeholders in email templates.

If you have more than one provider in your business, be sure to check out this new feature!

The new schedule ‘zoom’ lets you expand your Full Slate calendar to better see appointment details and navigate a busy schedule. If many of your appointments are 30 minutes or shorter, you’ll love the ability to see your schedule three times its regular size. On these shorter appointments, you can now see the client, service, start time and end time. And it’s even possible to schedule appointments as short as five minutes long with appointment details visible when you hover over the appointment.

You can find the new zoom feature under the ‘more’ button on the Schedule tab. Thanks to everyone who requested this great feature!

Clients can now add new appointments to their calendar with a single click from their appointment confirmation email. An appointment file, known as an .ics file, is included in every ‘appointment confirmation’ and ‘accept appointment’ email to clients, so all they have to do is click on the file and the appointment is automatically added to their default calendar, such as Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar. This works whether your client schedules the appointment or you do.

Not only is this a great convenience for your clients, but, just as reminder emails can help reduce no-shows, so can easily adding the appointment on their everyday calendar!

Now you can present openings to clients in a calendar-month view so they can easily see all openings across an entire month. This is a great way to present your schedule to clients if you have limited openings or if clients generally book a month or more in advance.

You can select the monthly view under Setup > Booking Rules, which will then render everywhere clients can schedule with you — landing page, website scheduling widget and Facebook page.

Of course, you can still choose to let clients browse your schedule with the weekly view or search for openings based on criteria entered clients.

You can now limit the number of daily appointment hours that can be scheduled with you by clients. Are you a massage, bodywork, or other professional who needs to limit how many hours you perform certain services each day? If so, this new feature will really help you control your schedule. Now you can define your daily “work” limit — four hours, five hours, six hours, up to twelve hours — and exempt services that are not subject to your limit, such as initial consultations.

Thanks to all of you who asked for this feature. It only takes a moment to set your limit under Setup > Booking Rules, so check it out today!

Each client record in your Full Slate account now includes a Google Map to their address on file. If you perform services at your clients’ home or place of business, you’ll love this new built-in mapping feature. For each client in your client database with a physical address on file, you’ll find two Google Map links:

• ‘Map’ – This launches a Google Map of the client’s location in a separate browser window.

• ‘Directions’ – This launches Google Map directions from your business’s address (on the Company tab) to your client’s home or place of business.

Another customer suggestion that’s now live on Full Slate!

The New Appointment button is a new way for you to schedule appointments with clients, and it has some handy built-in features. While scheduling an appointment, do your clients sometimes want to know what upcoming openings you have? The New Appointment button is a great way to see openings and quickly schedule a time that works.

The New Appointment button can be found at the top of the Schedule tab and on the Clients tab. Clicking on it results in a drop-down of your services. After you select the desired service, the appointment details box provides all openings that support the selected service for the selected staff member(s). Now you can let the client know when you have openings and quickly select one that works. Enter the client’s name (unless you started from the Clients tab in which case it’s automatically included), and you’re done.

So here’s what makes this new feature really powerful: Full Slate will only present times that are available in your schedule and that meet your Appointment Times settings under Setup. So if you’ve specified that appointments must start ‘on the hour’ or if you’ve specified that a particular service can only be scheduled on Mondays and Tuesdays, Full Slate will only show openings that meet those criteria.

Tip: Because openings on the New Appointment button mirror those presented to your clients on your landing page and scheduling widget, if you ever want to quickly see what openings your clients will see, you can use this feature for that too.

Of course you can still schedule the old fashioned way by clicking the appropriate time slot on the calendar. As always, if you have any questions, let us know!

Full Slate now offers additional currency, phone number and language support for businesses worldwide. It’s exciting to see businesses all over the world using Full Slate so we decided it’s time to provide more support to customers located outside the United States.

British pound? Brazilian Real? South African Rand? Full Slate now supports all major world currencies. You can now list prices on your services in your currency. And if you let your clients pay for appointments via Paypal, the price will be transfered to Paypal in the proper currency.

We also expanded phone number fields to include most worldwide formats, so you can enter your business, mobile and other phone numbers in the format of your home country.

And finally, input fields now accept all international characters so you can customize your Full Slate account in your home language. Default text is still in English, but you can easily supplement this with instructions your clients can read.

If you find that your currency, phone number or language is not supported, please let us know!