Do you work by appointment? If you’re a consultant, coach, personal trainer, medical provider, or any other professional who works by appointment, you need to know about Amelia, a powerful and easy to use WordPress appointment calendar.
Amelia is a paid plugin ($59) and it’s worth the price. I use it on this site for appointments for coaching and consultation and WordPress orientation for new website clients.
It’s easy to set up and customize to match your branding and has a ton of features. Here’s a rundown of the Amelia’s features and customization options.
Dashboard
Amelia’s dashboard gives you a quick look at the big picture. You can see upcoming appointments, appointments by each employee, and customer data. This is a demo from Amelia’s website.
Here are the specifics.
Services
This is probably the best place to start. For each service you provide, you’ll add information about the appointment: duration, buffer time (time immediately before and after the service appointment), minimum and maximum capacity (for groups), whether or not it’s a recurring appointment, and which employee is involved.
You can require payment in advance, and there’s an easy Zoom integration that lets you schedule virtual appointments if you choose this option.
Employees
You can add employees with contact information. Each appointment entry requires an employee, so set that up even if you’re the only employee, as in my case. When you add an employee, you’ll see the Assigned Services tab, where you’ll add the services that employee provides. You can set their rates for each service and you can enter days they work and off days.
Events
If you have a recurring event, such as a weekly class or other scheduled session, you can set that up as an Event and set the price, staff involved, dates, times, locations, and other specifics. You can also customize the look and colors of your events.
Locations
If you have multiple locations, you can set them up with address, a map with pinned icon and images.
Customers
The Customers section gives you a list of all customers who have scheduled appointments and their dates. You can add a WordPress user name if you allow registration on your site.
Finance
The Finance area keeps track of your payments received and allows you to set up coupons for discounted services. You can sort by customer, employee, service, service/event, and status.
Notifications
You can customize the messages you receive and the messages sent to customers who sign up. Amelia provides templates for accepted, rejected, pending, canceled, rescheduled appointments and next-day reminders and follow-up emails. These can all be tailored to your customers and services. You can even send automated birthday greetings.
Amelia Settings
Allow some time to go through the settings. There are numerous options in each area.
General
These settings control how you want Amelia to handle appointments sitewide. Settings such as lead time before the appointment, the ability to add to Google Calendar, iCal, or other calendars, and a redirect URL after booking is complete.
Company
Company settings is pretty simple — your company name, address, URL, and phone number.
Notifications
Set your email controls for notification emails to admins and to customers.
Working Hours and Days Off
This is an important setting. Mark holidays or other dates off, so that appointments cannot be scheduled. You can indicate the days and hours you’ll accept appointments, and they can be different for each day of the week. This is an overall setting, so individual employees’ work hours will only affect that employee’s appointments.
Payments
You can set payment gateways, such as Strip or PayPal and whether to enable coupons.
Integrations
Integrate with Google Calendar, Outlook and iCal for appointments, and Zoom for virtual meetings.
Customize Your Appointment Calendar
This is the fun part. Amelia makes it simple to incorporate your brand colors so that your appointment calendar fits in with the rest of your site. Choose your font, background color or gradient for your calendar and font color. If you’d rather have a flat color than a gradient for your calendar background, just add the same color in both gradient fields.
User Interface
Amelia provides a lovely user interface that resizes nicely to work on mobile devices.
First, the user will select the desired service from the dropdown list.
Then they’ll select the day and time, based on your availability settings.
After they complete payment for a paid service, the appointment will be confirmed with an option to add it to their calendar if you’ve enabled calendar integration.
There are other WordPress appointment calendar solutions, some free. If appointments are an important part of your site, Amelia is worth the investment.
