Appointments Setup

This guide will walk you through configuring your appointment system in CloudBridal. We'll start with essential setup steps to get your basic booking system running, then explore additional features to enhance your customer experience and streamline your operations.

Essential Setup

Before you can start accepting appointments, you'll need to complete these three core steps. Each component works together to create a seamless booking experience for both you and your customers.

Creating Appointment Types

Appointment types define the different services you offer and how they operate. Common examples include bridal appointments (typically 90-120 minutes), bridesmaid appointments (60 minutes), alterations fittings (30-45 minutes), and prom/formal appointments (60 minutes). Your specific setup may vary.

General Settings:

• Name: The name of the appointment type that the customer sees when booking.
• Description: An optional description you can use to provide details about the appointment.
• Appointment Stage: Choose between first-time or follow-up. First-time appointments will always create a new customer profile when the appointment is confirmed. On the other hand, follow-up appointments are tied to an existing customer profile.
• Who Can Book: Choose whether the appointment is bookable both by Customers (through the booking tool) and Staff (through CloudBridal), or just by Staff.
• Duration (Minutes): The length of the appointment in minutes. Must be an increment of 15 minutes.
• Buffer Period (Minutes): The gap in minutes after the end of an appointment before taking bookings for the next appointment. This can be useful if you need to build some time in for overages or to prepare for the next appointment. Must be an increment of 15 minutes.
• Accent Color: This color is used as the event color in the staff view of your calendar. If you leave this blank, it uses the room color instead.
• Associated Customer Type: Link appointments to specific customer categories (e.g., "Bride" or "Prom"). This automatically sets up the right profile type when new customers book.
• Disallow Cancellation: Prevents customers from being able to cancel the appointment themselves, and requires that they contact your store to cancel.
• Disallow Rescheduling: Prevents customers from being able to reschedule the appointment themselves, and requires that they contact your store to reschedule.
• Inactive: Whether you wish to deactivate the appointment type for booking.

Payment Settings (requires Stripe):

CloudBridal integrates with Stripe to handle deposits, payments, or reservations. For each appointment type, you can:

• Require immediate payment during booking
• Hold a card to secure a booking, with the option of charging a fee for no-shows or late cancellations
• Manual charging by staff members
• Set different amounts on a per-appointment-type basis
• Customize disclaimer messages to establish your policy

Email Settings:

CloudBridal allows you to send targeted emails based on the appointment lifecycle. This includes Reminder emails, which are sent before the appointment (defaults to 1 day before). Additionally, this includes status transition emails. For example, when an appointment is Pending, Confirmed, Declined, or Cancelled. Each appointment type can have its own unique email message, so you can set up distinct messaging for different appointment types like first-time bridal, prom, etc.

You can also set up more general-purpose email messages by navigating to Settings > Appointments and then selecting the Email & SMS Settings tab. The general email messages are used only when there isn't a more specific appointment type message configured. For example, you may want to create a general Declined message, but keep type-specific Confirmed messages.

SMS Settings:

Requires Twilio Integration (SMS)

SMS message setup follows the same process as email message setup: the same exact conditions are available. We recommend keeping SMS messages short and to-the-point: ideally under 150 characters.

Event Settings:

CloudBridal allows you to configure special events like sample sales and trunk shows. These events are generally for a limited time, and the event settings tab allows you to define the date ranges when the appointment type is available for booking.

Setting Up Rooms

Rooms in CloudBridal are intended to help you manage your overall capacity. A single room can handle one appointment at a time. Additional rooms allow you to take multiple appointments at the same time.

Room Configuration:

• Name rooms clearly (e.g., "Bridal Suite 1", "Alterations Room")
• Assign which appointment types can be allocated to each room
• Set distinct colors for easy calendar identification
• Use room restrictions to ensure specialized appointments (like alterations) only book in appropriate spaces
• Consider creating temporary rooms for busy seasons or special events

Configuring Schedules

Schedules determine when appointments can be booked. They're highly flexible and can be customized to match your business operations.

Schedule Types:

• Fixed Schedule: Your regular weekly operating hours
• Staff-Linked Schedule: Link availability to staff working hours instead of fixed times

Once you decide how you would like to set up your schedules, you must also define these additional settings:

• Day of Week: Which day of week to make the schedule available
• Start/End Times: Defines when the room is considered open and closed for booking
• Offer Appointments Mode: Defines how slots are calculated for this schedule. By default, the system uses Optimal Fit mode, which tries to neatly create optimal slots to maximize your scheduling capacity for a day. However, you may want to offer your clients more flexibility, in which case the other modes (Every 15 minutes, Every Half Hour, or On the Hour) could be good options. The main consideration with the more flexible modes is that they could result schedule gaps based on how your customers book appointments.
• Auto-Accept Incoming Appointment Requests: This automatically confirms the appointment for you. If you leave this unchecked, a staff member will need to manually confirm each incoming appointment.
• Prevent Gaps: Enabling this will make it so customers must book sequential appointments. This means your first customer for the room can book any slot they want. However, all subsequent bookings must be adjacent to an existing booking.
• Inactive: Whether to make this schedule no longer available for booking.
• Bookable by Staff Only: Whether only staff members should be allowed to book appointments on this schedule. This is useful for reserving capacity or having off-hours availability.

Configuring Questions

After you've configured schedules, you're technically ready to start taking appointments! However, it's a good idea to make sure your appointment booking form captures all of the information you need about the customer in order to successfully run the appointment. To that end, you are able to add additional questions to the booking form and obtain any additional required information. To begin configuring questions, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the appointment settings page
2. Click the Field Setup tab at the top

Default Questions

Certain questions are integrated into the appointment booking form by default:

• Full Name - required
• Email Address - required
• Phone Number - required
• Event Date - optional, can be hidden
• Home Address - optional, can be hidden
• Referral Type - optional, can be hidden
• Questions/Comments - optional, can be hidden
• First time visiting bridal shop - optional, can be hidden

Custom Questions

You may want to add additional questions that aren't provided by default. Some examples of this are Budget, Dress Size, Venue, Social Media Handle, etc. To do so, you will need to follow these steps:

1. In the Custom Appointment Questions section, enable either Add Custom Questions for First-Time Appointments or Add Custom Questions for Follow-Up Appointments, depending on which stage you want to capture the additional information.
2. Click the Add Custom Question button
3. Fill out the form as needed based on the type of information you want to collect. Much of this follows the same setup as other Custom Fields, but appointments have some unique options available. To summarize:

• Field Label: The customer-facing label for the question
• Field Type: Each of these types renders a different input type, so be sure to select something appropriate based on the type of data you want to collect.
• Display Mode: Text Input allows for free form typing, and Dropdown Input creates a dropdown where the customer must select from a predefined list of values. If you configure this as a dropdown, you must also provide the list of dropdown values.
• Field Width: Controls how much space the field takes in its row within the form. For customers in the appointment scheduler, it always takes the full width regardless of the setting. This only matters for controlling the width in the staff view of the booking form.
• Help Text: Additional message under the field that provides some additional instructions, if needed.
• Answer is Required: Enable to enforce that the client provides an answer.
• Show in Eligible Tables/Lists: A more advanced setting that surfaces this data in certain contexts. Generally recommended to leave unchecked unless needed.
• Show in Eligible Reports: A more advanced setting that surfaces this data in certain reports. Generally recommended to leave unchecked unless needed for reporting purposes.
• Additional Appointment Field Settings: Provides additional control in terms of which appointment types to display the question for, as well as whether the question should be visible/required for staff, customers, or both.

Other Setup

After you've configured the essentials, you can tweak some of the other settings to your liking.

General Appointment Settings

• Enable Appointment Slot Waitlist: If enabled, your customers will be able to add themselves to a waitlist for slots that are fully booked. Then if a cancellation occurs, the eligible waitlist request will be surfaced to the top of the pending appointments area, where a staff member can reach out to the customer and offer the slot.
• Condense Appointment Calendar Timeline: Condenses the vertical space for the appointment calendar.
• Appointment Calendar Color Theme: Changes how event colors display in the appointment calendar.
• Follow-up Stages: Allows you to streamline your follow-up appointment types so that you don't have to create additional appointment types to track the stage of the follow-up.

Appointment Booking and Modification Rules

• Allow Customers to Cancel Appointments: Whether customers can cancel appointments themselves. Can be overridden per appointment type.
• Allow Customers to Reschedule Appointments: Whether customers can reschedule appointments themselves. Can be overridden per appointment type.
• Cancellation Notice Period (Hours): Appointments that fall within the notice period cannot be cancelled by customers.
• Reschedule Notice Period (Hours): Appointments that fall within the notice period cannot be rescheduled by customers.
• Minimum Booking Lead Time (Hours): Set how far in advance customers must book (default: 12 hours). Can be overridden per appointment type.
• Maximum Booking Lead Time (Months): Control how far ahead customers can schedule (default: 3 months). Can be overridden per appointment type.

Appointment Scheduler Colors

This area allows you to control the various branded colors throughout the appointment scheduler. We recommend updating these to better suit your brand colors. You can then preview how the scheduler looks by clicking the Preview Scheduler button at the top of the settings area.

Making Your Scheduler Available

You have several options for making your scheduler available to your customers. These options are all available at the bottom of the Appointment Settings Page.

1. Direct Links

• Create links for specific appointment types
• This is a good option when you want to have full control over your web page design. You can create a page with details about your appointment types and simply add these links to your booking buttons within the page.

2. General Booking Link

• Show all available appointment types
• This is a very simple option with just a single booking link. When a customer clicks this link, it will bring them to a page where they can select their desired appointment type and proceed with the booking.

3. Embed

• Embed the scheduler directly in your site, which creates a seamless booking experience for your clients. The main consideration is that this requires more technical knowledge to set up, so be sure that you are confident making the required changes yourself, or you can work with a designer to assist you.

Updated on: 12/07/2025