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.
Time System
The Time system setting changes the various views throughout the system from a 12 hour clock to a 24 hours
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
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)
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.
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.
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”
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.
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]