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General settings contains various defaults that appear accross the front and backend areas of LatePoint. The general setup categories are:

  • Appointment Settings
  • Restrictions
  • Currency Settings
  • Phone Settings
  • Appearance Settings
  • Social Login
  • Setup Pages
  • Other Settings

Settings – General

Setup Menu Location

Settings>settings>general

Appointment Settings

Appointment settings contain general behavior when a customer uses the booking form.

Default Appointment Status

By Default the customer is approved and the booking is added to the calendar.

You can set the default status to Pending Approval, Payment Pending or Cancelled. Email notifications to customers can be sent for all status types and changes.

The SMS setup in LatePoint sends an SMS for the default booking status step only.

  • If you set it to pending it will send an SMS on pending only, not if the status is going to approved.
  • If you set it to approved it only has to send one SMS as there is no status change but it still gets delivered.
Warning

The customer can still book any appointment slot that is marked with Pending Approval or Payment Pending. The front-end booking form does not block this from the calendar.

Time System

The Time system setting changes the various views throughout the system from a 12 hour clock to a 24 hours

Setting
12 Hour Setting

24 Hour Setting

Date Format

The default view for the date format can be controlled here to allow for your typical date variations.

Selectable time intervals in minutes

Time slots are shown when a booking is placed. This setting controls the hour/Minute intervals they can start the booking on.

Each green square here is represented by this value.

Disable verbose date output

Date format is shown with the month as a Name rather than the represented month number.

Setting the Disable Verbose Date Output changes this value to just numerical

Verbose Enabled
Verbose Disabled

Show Appointment End Time

Latepoint by default shows the start time of the appointments but can be configured to show the start and end time in all views.

Restrictions

Booking Restrictions with Date, Customers and Agents

Earliest/Latest possible booking

Earliest and Latest possible booking allows for restrictions on how soon or how far in advance customers can book.

The formats are extremely flexible with options like:

  • Using a fixed start date – Great for openings. (yyyy-mm-dd)
  • Block booking date by 1 future day – Giving you preparation time (+2days)
  • Have only 3 months worth of future bookings (+3months)

TIP

The earliest possible booking takes into calculation the current day.
For 24 hours notice you will need to insert +2days

Maximum number of future bookings

Prevents customers from booking too many appointments in advance. Other customers may then have the opportunity to book.

Agents can only be present in one location at a time

Using the location add-on will extend the selection form to include an extra step that allows for locations. Agents are then simultaneously available at all locations if their schedule allows. They could be booked at location 1 and location 2 for the same time slot. To limit this the “Agents can only be present in one location at a time” should be selected. When the agent is booked in one location it removes their availability at all other locations.

Currency Settings

Option to display your particular regional currency.

Used to display the currency of you choice to all areas of the LatePoint software.

Phone Settings

Ability to control or suggest the phone field when customers book.

Phone Input Mask

Displays the length of the phone number in the customer booking form. It does not do any validation except for the length. You can only enter the number 9 in a place where you expect the customer to type a number. When the spaces are full with numbers then the phone section is validated and the booking can continue.

Disable Phone Formatting

This will bypass the phone input mask. The customer could type in any length phone number and the system will accept it if the option is ticked.

Phone code for your country

Set for adding a prefix to the phone number when using sms services such as Twilio. This is only useful if all your customers are local to the area code you have setup.

TIP

For International Phone numbers the system does not check the customer location to add their area code so a few steps are required to make it more flexible.

1. In the “Phone code for your country” remove any numbers and just have “+”. This will allow the international phone code to be entered by the customer.

2. In the “Phone Input Mask” put (+999) 9999 9999 (or your particular format).

All customers would then have to enter an international format ph number every time they book even if they are local, which is not ideal.    

Appearance Settings

Color settings, style and timeslot appearance.

Color Scheme for Booking Form

This is for the available colors that LatePoint can reflect on the front end customer booking form to adjust to your theme colors.

Border Style

The style change is a very subtle rounding of the corner on the front end.

Round
Square

Show Time Slots as

Show Time Slots as either a Timeline or Timeboxes is a variation which may help when the timeslots are relatively small and for mobile phone users.

Timeline
Timeboxes

Do not show time picker when only one time slot is available

When enabled the day will display without a green bar but not show the red tint. In this case the 12-Feb only has one remaining slot. After selecting the day on the calendar the time will automatically apply without having to choose.

Social Login

Google and Facebook configurations for customer logins.

Enabling the social logins for Google and Facebook allow for customers to pass their credentials to the LatePoint customer information screen.

This login information has to match the criteria that LatePoint has configured as required.

If you require Address, Phone or any other setting it must be able to be supplied from either Facebook or Google otherwise the login will fail and return a black empty user screen.

Further Information

See the Google Login Setup that details further regarding the use of this option.

Setup Pages

WordPress names of pages for LatePoint customer redirections

The setup pages direct LatePoint to know what you have called your particular customer pages in WordPress. As they may be created with different name and this section allows you to direct the pages elsewhere if needed.

Within the dashboard is an option to cancel the appointments. This is now controlled via the dashboard setting “Allow customer cancel their bookings”

Further Information

See the Customer Dashboard that explains further details regarding the use of these pages.

Customer Settings

WordPress user link and ability to cancel bookings.

Use WordPress users as customers

If you have an existing WordPress user database the login information can be used within the LatePoint booking frontend.

When enabled a new column “WP USER ID” is shown in the records>customers page

A red dot indicates that the LatePoint and WordPress user has not synchronized their accounts. Either

  • The user exists in WordPress and LatePoint but the passwords are different.
  • The user exists only in LatePoint.

By using the “Connect to WP Users” option the accounts will be created and passwords synchronized. This option allows all accounts to be syncronized at once.

Alternatively you can edit each individual LatePoint account to check password status and connect the user to the WordPress database.

Any existing WordPress users that do not exist in LatePoint or have not made a booking will be synchronized when they make a booking. At this point when checking out with their WordPress account details, a LatePoint account will be created from the WordPress details.

Allow customers to cancel their bookings

By default customers cannot cancel their own bookings. This option enables the cancel button to display in the customer dashboard against each upcoming booking.

Other Settings

Calendar Size and customer shortcode.

Daily Calendar Minimum Height (In pixels)

This works in conjunction with the selectable time interval setting.

As a minimum, each hour in the schedule is displayed. Each hour then gets broken down into the selectable time interval that you have setup.

Each hour block broken down into 15 minute slots

The default height is 700 which generally allows the daily view to show a normal 9am-5pm working day in full view on the screen.

Shortcode for a book button on customer dashboard

The Customer dashboard has a area which can display a booking button. The button should be customized similar to other areas allowing consistency in your theme across the site. This is basically an area for a shortcode for logged in customers. Things like hidden services could be presented to the customer which are not on the normal booking screen.

As this is standard HTML section you can place your own custom button in this section which allows full control of where your customer could be sent.

<!-- wp:buttons --> <div class="wp-block-buttons"><!-- wp:button --> <div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link" href="http://latepoint.test">Booking Redirection</a></div> <!-- /wp:button --></div> <!-- /wp:buttons -->

Just create your own button first and copy the HTML code directly over the [latepoint_book_button]

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