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This guide applies to:

  • Basic Edition
  • Plus Edition
  • Pro Edition
  • Business Edition

Introduction

Use Formidable Forms to create complex appointment booking forms using Simply Schedule Appointments (SSA).

With Formidable Forms, you can make booking forms that include conditional logic and many more advanced fields.

Potential Use Cases:

  • Direct visitors to specific appointment types based on their information
  • Custom confirmation pages after booking

What You Need First

If you plan on taking payments through Formidable Forms, make sure you’re using a Formidable Forms Edition that accepts payments – not all of their plugin tiers do.


Video Overview

YouTube video

Using the Appointment Form Field in Formidable Forms

Go to your WordPress Dashboard > Formidable > Add New to create a new form for booking appointments.

Make sure to include the basic fields that SSA requires to log appointments:

  • Name
  • Email

You could also create other fields to collect customer information for the appointment. SSA should be able to collect this information too. So, feel free to use Checkboxes, Radios, Phone Numbers, etc.

Adding the Appointment field to a form

Now, add the Appointment field to your form to let people choose a time slot. Find it under Advanced Fields > Appointment.

Appointment field

The Appointment field settings let you choose whether you’d like to display all the Appointment Types or a specific Appointment Type (assuming you’ve created multiple Types in the SSA admin page).

Choosing a Specific Appointment Type for the form

Add the booking form to your website

After that, you should be able to add your form to any WordPress page or post. Use the Formidable Forms’ shortcode or block. Add the booking form to your website.

You could also create other fields to collect customer information for the appointment. 

All of the information collected in Formidable Forms will display in SSA.


Booking a Time Slot with Formidable Forms

Visitors will use your form to enter their information and choose an Appointment Time Slot.

When they choose a time slot, they’ll see a confirmation of their time. After they’ve filled in the required details and selected a time, they can submit the form.

Booking a time slot with a basic form

Pending Form Submission Status

When a time slot is selected in a booking form created through Formidable Forms, an appointment is immediately recorded and marked as Pending Form Submission.

SSA will give the user 60 minutes to fill out their form. If SSA does not get any feedback from Formidable Forms of form submission, SSA marks this appointment as Abandoned.

If the form submission happens within those 60 minutes, the appointment is marked as Booked.

When an appointment is selected with this Pending Form Submission status, you can mark the appointment as Abandoned, or keep the Appointment.

Learn more about the Booking Status and how to extend the 60-minute pending period, and how to manage pending bookings.


Managing the Booked Formidable Forms Appointments

When you view the entry in the Formidable Forms, you’ll see a summary of the details and a link to manage the appointment in SSA.

In SSA, you should see all the Formidable Forms field details along with a link to view the entry in Formidable Forms.

Viewing appointment details

Cancelling Formidable Forms Appointments

To cancel an appointment, go to WordPress Dashboard > Appointments > Click on the Appointment you’d like to cancel > Click Cancel this Appointment > Confirm Cancellation.

The entry in Formidable Forms will need to be deleted separately; canceling in SSA doesn’t affect those entries.

Canceling an appointment through SSA ensures the time slot is opened again on the Booking Calendar.

Appointments can’t be canceled or deleted from the Formidable Forms entries page. If you delete an entry, SSA will still hold the record of the appointment.

Overhead Calendar View of Booked Appointments

The Appointments fields are not yet compatible with the Views feature in Formidable Forms.

If you’d like to have a Calendar View of your booked appointments, you could sync SSA with Google Calendar.


Sending Customer and Admin Notifications

You could use either Formidable Forms or SSA to send your clients notifications.

We recommend using SSA to send text messages or email notifications. Since this will make sure that you can send:

  • clients a unique cancelation/rescheduling link
  • tailored emails depending on the Appointment Types booked
  • you and your clients get cancelation emails

Or, if you’d like to keep all your emails with Formidable Forms, here are some guides to setting up text messages or email notifications.

Remember, if you use Formidable Forms for the notifications, you must disable the default email notifications in SSA. They are set up to automatically send once you finish the Setup Wizard.


Conditional Logic

To learn more about using Formidable Forms to create robust and complex booking forms, we’ve put together the following guides:


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