Now that Version 5 is done and launched, I’ve been having fun getting down with programming projects that AREN’T a massive, under-wraps operation!  To that end, earlier this week I got a support question asking:

A pet peeve of mine is clients cancel an appointment by deleting the calendar invite you send via CA.com.

Is there a configuration I’m overlooking to integrate a “cancel / reschedule” link into the calendar invite?

A fine question!  Because all parties to an Appointment in CoachAccountable have their own login (which is not typically the case while a general purpose scheduler), the usual way to cancel or reschedule is from within the app, while logged in.

But by that very same token, general purpose schedulers offer, out of necessity, something like “Need to cancel this?  Click here.  Need to reschedule this?  Click here.”

These allow easy to access to modify an already-scheduled Appointment, and though they’re certainly not needed with CA (wherein everyone can log in to handle all their business, including appointment modifications), I figure that’s a nice addition for two reasons:

1. This will indeed make it more likely that clients will cancel or reschedule in a way that will be picked up by CA for all the beyond-mere-event setting functionality that that entails¹ (meaning coach won’t have to do it as a separate step).
2. This makes it possible for a client’s assistant, who may be charged with managing their appointments, to make those changes (and WITHOUT requiring the full login credentials of that client, which would reveal potentially sensitive information about the coaching itself).

So, these sorts of links for managing appointments are now a thing!

To take advantage, on can include [cancelLink] and [rescheduleLink] magic tags in both Appointment Notification and Appointment Reminder email templates:

When a client (or their assistant, or indeed anyone else!) clicks the cancel link, they find themselves on a page that looks like this:

Clicking a reschedule link takes one to a place like this:

Simple as that.

The beauty of these is that one is NOT necessarily logged in when on one of those pages, and one is ONLY allowed to see and modify the one, single Appointment that is implied by the magic link that got one here.

It’s a nice measure of allowing an assistant to manage those calendar details for a busy client, and further closes the already narrow gap between CoachAccountable scheduling and other, more general purpose scheduling apps.