It’s no lie when they say that to run your own business you have to do literally everything, especially in the beginning when you’re finding your feet.
One of the best tools I can recommend to anyone is Acuity Scheduling. If you add Acuity to your arsenal you’ll notice a drop in emails – we all want less emails in our inbox right?! Acuity has just been taken over by Squarespace so is also known as Squarespace Scheduling.
So what is Acuity? It’s a system that lets users automate appointment bookings by offering a real-time view of their calendars meaning there are less emails flying backwards and forwards as you try to book in a meeting with someone. How many times have you offered a date and time and the other person has come back and said they can’t do it but could do this time instead…only to find that you can’t do that either so you send another round of emails. Not only is this frustrating for you, but also for the other person as their inbox is also flooded with unnecessary emails.
The added benefit of this means that clients have a little more control over their appointments with you and that will help you ultimately build a stronger client relationship.
With your customized scheduling page, clients can easily view your real-time availability and self-schedule their own appointments meaning that if you’re not at your desk and your client is, they can book a meeting with you, get it off their to do list and your business is working even if you’re not.
There are some great scheduling limits that you can set up so that you stay in control of your diary, even if your clients think they are the ones in control! You can tell Acuity how far in advance you want to take bookings, whether clients are able to reschedule or cancel appointments and how far before a booked appointment your client can reschedule or cancel.
However booking meetings isn’t the only thing Acuity can help you with. As a super brief outline…
- You can accept payments and deposits into systems you already have in place such as Stripe or Paypal.
- You can offer discount codes and vouchers for your clients
- It’s easy to upsell little extras with check-out add-ons
- It also has a handy feature where you can run a report for any no shows so if you’ve got a frequent customer who is a little tricky, you’ve got the evidence right there for any conversations you need to have with them
- It integrates with SO many other tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, Mailchimp and several CRM’s
- It’s also compatible with Zapier so you can automate SO much more in your business!
- Prices start from $14 a month (that’s about £10 a month) for the basic package and if you can afford to pay annually you’ll save some more money.
There’s also an app that you can use to make things even easier for both you and your clients.
I cant recommend Acuity Scheduling enough to anyone who will listen. Anything to make running your own business easier has got to be a winner hasn’t it?!