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Appointments and the diary

Create a booking for a patient

Use the focused three-stage flow to add an appointment for a new or existing patient from a phone or larger screen.

For: Owners, administrators, office admins, and permitted practitioners

Before you start

  • An active service and an active practitioner assigned to that service.

Book in three focused stages

  1. Select New booking from the dashboard, or select Add beside a provider in day view.
  2. In Service & patient, choose the service. A service for existing patients opens patient search, while a service for new patients opens the contact fields. If the service accepts both, choose New patient or Existing patient once.
  3. For an existing patient, enter at least two characters from their name, email address, or phone number, then select the matching result. For a new patient, enter their first name, last name, and any available contact details.
  4. Open the advanced choices only when you want to prefer a provider, choose a location, change the starting date, or use Schedule override.
  5. Continue to Time. DiaryCare automatically searches the next seven days and shows up to the first twelve valid choices in time order.
  6. Choose a time. Each choice shows its date, provider, duration, and location where applicable, then continue to Confirm.
  7. Check the appointment summary. Open Optional details only when you want to add the reason for the visit or answer a service question.
  8. Use the sticky Book appointment action to create the appointment.
DiaryCare mobile staff booking flow showing the Time stage, validated appointment choices, and the sticky Continue to confirm action.
The focused phone flow keeps progress, the next valid times, and the next action easy to reach.

What the numbers show

  1. 1See the three stages and which one is active.
  2. 2Choose a compact time card showing the provider and duration.
  3. 3Continue from the sticky action without scrolling to the end of the page.
Good to know: DiaryCare does not repeat the new-or-existing question when the service already determines it. Patient search results remain in the page on a phone and become a dropdown on a wider screen. Moving between stages keeps the details you have entered. Changing the service, provider, location, or starting date clears an old time, and a late search cannot replace newer results. During the focused phone flow, the usual quick-navigation bar is hidden so it cannot cover the sticky booking action; the full menu remains available.

How staff times are chosen

The automatic seven-day search uses the same availability engine as public booking, but uses Internal booking minimum notice in Clinic setup → Booking rules instead of the separate Online booking minimum notice or a service or provider online lead-time override. Internal notice is 0 hours by default, so staff can choose the next otherwise-valid future start.

  • Working hours, service windows, time off and closures.
  • Service duration and buffers, location rules, and diary fill rules.
  • Daily and weekly booking caps, existing DiaryCare appointments, and Google busy time.
Good to know: DiaryCare checks the exact selected local day again when you submit. If another booking or calendar change has made that slot stale, the form refreshes the times and keeps the service, patient, and optional details in place. Retrying the same booking does not repeat its confirmation or calendar work. Staff bookings are confirmed immediately, bypass customer eligibility, and keep the selected service’s configured patient questions optional.

Start from a patient record

  1. Open the patient or customer record.
  2. Select Book appointment when the action is available.
  3. DiaryCare opens Service & patient with that record selected. Choose the service and continue through Time and Confirm.
Good to know: The patient identifier in the link is treated only as a hint. DiaryCare checks the active clinic and your permissions before showing a selected patient. A practitioner must also have manual booking and existing-patient selection enabled, and the patient must already belong to that practitioner's client history. An invalid, unavailable, or different-clinic record is never preselected.

Use a schedule override only for an exception

  1. Open the advanced choices in Service & patient and select Schedule override.
  2. Choose the service, a specific provider, an optional location, and the clinic-local date and time.
  3. Complete the patient search or new-patient fields shown for that service. If the service accepts both patient types, choose one once.
  4. Enter a clear reason for the override. The reason is required, can contain up to 500 characters, and is stored in the appointment activity.
  5. Review Confirm, then select Book with override.
Good to know: A schedule override can place an appointment outside working hours, time off, booking caps, or normal service availability. Diary clashes are still blocked, including active DiaryCare appointments and fresh Google Calendar busy time. A local time that does not exist during the daylight-saving spring change is also rejected.

Practitioner limits

An owner or administrator can allow practitioners to add bookings to their own diary. They can also allow practitioners to choose existing patients they have already treated. Practitioners cannot add a booking to another practitioner’s diary.

Connected staff app

On DiaryCare Pilot, authorised staff with manual booking permission can create a confirmed appointment through New or plus. The app searches patients and validated times on the server and writes a live clinic booking with the same confirmation and calendar side effects as the web flow.

  • Schedule override and custom service-question answers are not available on the mobile create flow in this release.
  • Reschedule, cancel, complete, no-show, approve, and reject remain on the web dashboard for the connected pilot.

Android booking preview differences

  • The preview offers fixed synthetic locations and times. It does not run the live web availability engine or provide the web schedule-override path.
  • Preview bookings are confirmed only in the app’s temporary synthetic workspace and reset after a cold process restart.
  • The preview does not create a live patient or booking, update Google Calendar, or send a confirmation.
Good to know: Do not enter real patient names, contact details, or clinical information in the Android preview. DiaryCare Preview is separate from the connected Pilot app.

Couldn’t find the answer?

Email contact@diarycare.co.uk and tell us which step you reached.

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