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Features & Settings Tweaks Required for 1099 Counselors.

Hi Square,

 

I'm considering using Square Appointments for a very large business opportunity (counseling services by 1099 contractors) and we already have 20,000 customers waiting for us to launch these services, but it's missing a few key settings. It's ashame, because all of the features are there, just needs some small additional settings or tweaks. Here's what we would need to kick off the business:

 

Mandatory Features

1. Restrict access to client list to only those clients which have booked with the employee. This is for privacy reasons and to avoid poaching of clients from competing contractors. 

 

2. Allow Google Calendar synching for self-access employees. Since the whole business model is based on home-based part-time contractors, they need more robust scheduling abilities. I'm not sure why this is only offered to full-access employees? Should be an easy change! Oh and they shouldn't be able to see anyone else's schedules

 

3. Allow employees to use "Customize staff availability" function to enter their custom hours. Using Personal event is just too tedious. It seems your system was built for employees in a physical location with set hours. Our business is home-based contractors with wildly different availability from week to week. They'll be living in customize staff availablity section.

 

Not as Urgent but Very Important as Well..

4. Calendar and booking preferences should be on a per-employee basis. Each contractor will have their own preference regarding "Reservation Guarantee" setting, for "Appintments must be made in advance", "cut off time for cancellation", and "appointments can't be scheduled farther out then"...

5. A new payment option. Require pre-payment AFTER employee accepts appointment if "Reservation Guarantee" setting is "Business must accept or decline all appointments". The customer would get the email letting them know accepted, and they would be given a button to pre-pay. If not pre-payed within X hours before the appointment, the appointment will be cancelled.

 

All of these features are necessary because the business model is 1099 contractors with their own businesses working from home with their own schedules who will not be taking payments. 

 

Please please let me know if this is going on the roadmap and the timelines. The first 3 changes above I think are not that hard and can allow me to kick off the business. We can later super-charge the business with options 4 and 5. 

 

Thanks for your time and consideration!

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There was one more feature I forgot.

 

Each service and each employee should have a "Notes" section associated with the profiles and then in email alerts section, there should be variables to insert the "notes". These notes would contain specific instructions for each type of service or for each employee. For example perhaps Sarah plans on calling you at the appointment time but Lisa prefers that you call into a conference bridge. Counseler Ted may require that clients be directed to a link to complete some additional information before the survey. 

 

Thanks!

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Square Community Moderator

@BenTheMan Sorry for the late reply here. I was able to get in contact with our Appointments Product Team and let them know about this post. 

 

There's a ton of good information here, so hopefully they can take this back and implement some of your feature requests to future product updates. 

 

If anything changes with Appointments, we'll let the community know 👍🏼

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Thank you so much Ej for listening and passing it on!

 

unrelated question - is it possible for us to use our own domain for the scheduling website? If not, happen to know if an iframe would work?

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Square Community Moderator

@BenTheMan While you're not able to use your own custom domain for your booking page, you can use the Booking Website Embed to give your clients the ability to book directly from your website. 

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Hi EJ,

 

Will the website embed show the entire square appointements website in it's entirety?

 

Ben

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because when I click "preview as main content" it jumps to services page only

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Square Community Moderator

@BenTheMan The website embed will reflect only the widget with the services that you've created. 

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