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Appointment Confirmations and Reminders
Appointment Confirmations and Reminders

How to set up automated SMS and emails for appointment confirmations and reminders

Jessica Magri avatar
Written by Jessica Magri
Updated over a week ago

To set up automated confirmations and reminders for your practice, you must have a role assigned to you that gives you access to the SMS and Email Templates tab in Settings. For more information on roles, see here.

In this article:


Create a new confirmation or reminder template

You can create a new confirmation or reminder template from the Settings page:

1. Go to the SMS and email templates tab.

2. Click New in the top right-hand corner.

3. Fill out the General information section:

If you are creating a Reminder, type the number of hours in advance that you want the reminder to be sent for.

4. Enter the content for the email or SMS. You can directly type in the text editor, or click on the Tags to insert customised information, such as a patient's last name.

5. Tick Active at the top of the screen to make the confirmation or reminder available to use.

6. Click Save.

Your created confirmation or reminder will appear in the SMS and email templates tab. To use the confirmation or reminder template for bookings, you must now activate it for your practice.

7. You can now add a hyperlink to your emails if you would like to, this can be done by clicking the hyperlink button as circled and the placeholder in the "Email message content" will appear:

Kindly paste your link where it says "replacewithlink.com" and free type the text you want your patient to see in the section where it says "YourLinkTextHere", it should look similar to the example below:

Using the example above, this is what your patient will see in the email they receive. They will see the words "test click" which they will click and that will lead them to the URL you inserted above:

It is very important not to remove any of the brackets or other characters used and only replace exactly as specified above.

NB: If you create new templates, these will not be automatically applied to appointments created prior to the template's creation. However, you can still apply the new template to these existing appointments by manually ticking these boxes in the calendar for each appointment made prior to the template's creation:



Activate a confirmation or reminder template

A confirmation or reminder template must be activated from the Settings page for your practice to be able to use it.

1. Go to the SMS and email templates tab.

2. Click the more options icon next to the template you want to activate.

3. Select Make active.

You can deactivate a confirmation or reminder template at any time by following the same steps as above, and selecting Make inactive in more options.


Link a new product to a confirmation or reminder

Make sure your practice have first activated the confirmation or reminder before you attempt to do this.

1. Go to the Products page.

2. Click New in the top left-hand corner of the page.

3. Create the new product as you normally would. For more information on creating new products see here.

4. Scroll down to the Confirmation and Cancellation messages and the Reminders section, and use the dropdown menus to choose the confirmations and reminders you want activated for that product.

5. Click Save at the top of the screen.

When you now book an appointment with that product, your configured confirmations and reminders will be automatically sent out to the patient.


Edit a confirmation or reminder template

You can edit a confirmation or reminder template at any time from the Settings page:

1. Go to the SMS and email templates tab.

2. Select the confirmation or reminder template that you want to edit.

3. Make the edits you want. Note: there may be some restrictions to the edits you can make with templates marked as a system template.

4. When you have made the edits you want, click Save at the top of the screen.

NB: If you edit an existing template, any email/SMS already scheduled will be sent using the new edited version of the template.


SMS Sender Name

You can set the name that will appear on SMS messages sent by your practice, from the Settings page:

1. Go to the General tab.

2. Scroll down to the SMS settings section.

3. Type the name you want to appear on SMS messages into the SMS sender name box. Note: Names must be between 3-11 characters long, and have no spaces.

4. Click Save at the top of the page.

All SMS messages sent by your practice will now have the configured text as their sender name.

Note: If no sender name is set up, the sender name will default to 'NOTICE'.

For more information on SMS pricing please click here.

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