The Pencil'em.com Blog » New Features

Sort clients by Last name

Greg — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:37:28 +0000

We’ve got a simple but useful new feature to tell you about today, and it involves how you view your client lists. By default, Pencil’em will sort your clients by First name, so “Amy Smith” would come before “Christine Jones” and so on. We’ve now added the ability to list your clients alphabetized by last name, which does a few things. It changes the way the lists are laid out, so instead of “Amy Smith”, it will now read “Smith, Amy”. Alphabetizing would then take place based on the last name so “Jones, Christine” would come before “Smith, Amy”. Once enabled, all client lists will use the new format. This includes the scheduling page (client drop down), the clients page (client list, and email clients), as well as Pencil’em Mobile.

To enable this feature, simply click “Settings”, then click “Appointment Settings” in the left hand navigation. You will see a new drop down menu for “Client Name Display”. Simply select “First” or “Last” name first. Simple as that!

Pencil’em Creator featured on NBC

staff — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:25:58 +0000

We are excited to announce that Greg Goforth, the creator of Pencil’em Scheduling Software will appear on Central Valley Today with Host Alex Delgado on Friday, Nov. 20th at 11:00 am. Alex will be talking with Greg about Pencil’em as well as some cool new up and coming features. For those not in the Central Valley of California you can see the interview streamed from the KSEE 24 website at the web address below.

http://www.ksee24.com/programming/cvt

Bar Graphs, Line Charts and Earnings, Oh my!

Greg — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:51:42 +0000

Ok, silly blog titles aside, we’ve got some cool new features to tell you about today. It has always been the goal of Pencil’em to better the lives of our users by helping them build their own businesses and give world class tools at a very affordable cost. We are always looking for ways to better our software and one thing we saw as a problem in the beauty industry (especially to independent contractors) was the ability to easily see how much they make on a daily or monthly basis.

Lets take your taxes for instance. If you are using a book to manage your appointments, doing your taxes probably consists of flipping, page by page, through your appointment book and adding up each and every appointment. If you didn’t keep detailed records you are probably estimating the amount of money you made which can lead to inaccurate totals. There is a better way!

Today, we’ve rolled out several new reports that let you see the amount of money you have made, or are for casted to make. Come tax time all you will need to do is run the Earnings report to get exact, accurate, and detailed earnings for each month of the current year. If you run the detailed Earnings report you will be able to view an appointment register letting you see every appointment you performed for each month.

New Earnings Report

New Settings Screen

You will also notice that we have changed the way you access your account settings. You can now click the settings button from any page and you will get a drop down screen where you can update your password, phone number, username, email template, and logo. You will also see some cool new features here that allow you to see where you are in regards to your account set up (which is helpful to new users). As you start adding clients and services, and creating appointments you will see a cool set of graphs that give you quick stats regarding how many appointments you have per month (in line graph or Pie Chart), as well as monthly earnings at a glance.

New settings screen

The Pencil’em Bar

Greg — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:42:16 +0000

I would like to start this post off by first putting to rest the rumors that Pencil’em is opening a bar. It’s just not true. We did however add “The Pencil’em Bar” as a new feature to our application interface. The Pencil’em Bar was built to give you direct access to some cool new site features. The Pencil’em Bar gives you access to quick info like the number of appointments you have on the selected day, and how much money you are expected to make on the selected day. From the main scheduling page, simply click on a date and you will now see how many appointments, and how much money you are supposed to make that day. Next to these details you will find a link to the most current blog post. This should make it very easy for you to see when new company blogs are released.

We’ve got a lot of things planned for the Pencil’em Bar in the future so keep your eyes open (and on the blog!). Client self booking will be released soon, and The Pencil’em Bar will play a part in this new feature. Below is a screen shot outlining some of the features of The Pencil’em Bar:

The Pencil'em Bar

Pencil’em How-to: Add the Service name to reminder / confirmation emails

Greg — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 04:53:28 +0000

This has been a long requested feature, and we are proud to announce that we have added this feature to all Pencil’em accounts. There is good reason for the delay in rolling this feature out, and it is largely due in part to the way Pencil’em users create their services. In talking with our users, we discovered that many of you didn’t want the service listed in the reminder emails, or wanted to be able to control which services would appear in the emails and which wouldn’t. So we have now built this into the system and with a quick set up, you can select which services you would like to appear in your reminders and confirmation emails.

Add Services to reminder / confirmation emails

First, navigate to the “Services” page in the main menu.
Click on the first Service in your service list that you would like to make appear in the confirmation / reminder email
Click on the “Edit this Service” button and the Edit Service dialog form will appear.
You will notice there is now a new drop down menu labeled “Display in Emails?”, by default this will be set to No, so change it to “Yes”.
Click “Save Changes” on the dialog box to save the changes.
Repeat the above steps for each service you want to be made public (show up in confirmation / reminder emails).

The above steps are for services that have already been created. If you are creating a new service, the process is the same, however you would just specify wether or not it should appear in the emails at the time of creation.

Pencil’em How-to: Block out an entire day

Greg — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:28:47 +0000

So you going out of town, planning a trip, or just simply don’t want to be scheduled on a particular day. There is now a simple way to block out an entire day so that you won’t be scheduled. Just follow the instructions below:

Pencil’em Desktop:

Select “” from the “Select Client” drop down menu item.
From the “Personal Time” drop down menu item, select “Entire Day” to signify you would like to block out the entire day. At this point the “Select Time” menu settings will disappear since the entire day will be blocked out, there is no need to specify the start time.
Continue on to add your Appointment Label and any neccessary notes.
Click the “Create Personal Time” button and the personal appointment will be scheduled. It will appear in your daily view as a personal appointment starting at 12:00 am and lasting 24 hours. You can still book other appointments on this day, however you will need to confirm the booking conflict.

Pencil’em Mobile:

Click on “Schedule” to access the scheduling page.
Click on “Personal Appointment” in the secondary navigation bar.
Set the Date you would like to block out.
You can skip the “Start Time” as this will be an all day appointment, and the start time will be automatically set for you.
From the “Length” drop down menu select “Entire Day”.
Add a label and notes and click “Schedule”.

Recurring Appointments 2.0

Greg — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:22:29 +0000

We’ve reworked the way recurring appointments work (in look and function). In the past, the recurring appointments would automatically schedule recurring appointments for one year. After receiving feedback from our users, we’ve found that many users book appointments in chunks, like 3 – 4 months at a time. In this case, the system would create appointments for one year, when they really only needed recurring appointments for 3 or 4 months.

Clicking the “Recurring” button on the scheduling page now brings up a small pop up box (see the image below) and you can specify the Appt. Frequency (how often the appointment recurs IE every 2 weeks) and the Appt. Duration (this is how long the appointment should recur for, IE 4 months). So, if you select “2″ for Appt. Frequency and “4″ for Appt. Duration the appointment would be scheduled every 2 weeks for the next 4 months.

It’s a simple change, but one that makes the recurring functions even more flexible.

New Recurring Appt. box

New Look, Same Content

Greg — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:55:11 +0000

We are about 90% finished with the redesign of our public website, and we wanted to freshen things up on the blog as well. We know things look different, but rest assured, you can still find all the same content and posts we had here before. Keep watching the blog and we will let you know when we launch the new site!

Quickjump – Easily jump 2,4,6, or 8 weeks on your calendar

Greg — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 07:01:12 +0000

We’ve added a simple new feature today that gives you the ability to more easily navigate specific dates while booking appointments. Often times, when your sitting with a client, you will want to book a follow up appointment in “x” weeks. We’ve added a new feature that will easily let you jump 2, 4, 6, or 8 weeks as well as a “Today” and “Tomorrow” button. Using these Quickjump links gives you an instant visual confirmation of these dates without having to count weeks on a calendar.

To access this feature, simply click on the “Quickjump” button, found on the main scheduling screen, directly underneath the “Select Date” label (and above the “Recrurring” button). A pop up will appear that will allow you to select the date you would like to jump to. Your “Daily View” will be updated, as well as that date selected on the “Select Date” datepicker. See the image below for more details.

New "Quickjump" feature lets you navigate your schedule in a new way.

In a previous post on this blog, we made mention of a new feature we are going to be adding soon that will add the Service being performed to the confirmation and reminder emails. We are still working on this feature, but as we found out during development, there is a little more to it that we initially believed. We reached out to a number of Pencil’em users and found that not everyone wanted the service listed in the email, or only wanted specific services listed, and not others. Not to worry, we have a plan and are working hard to make the necessary changes to get this feature launched. We will update this blog again once it’s complete, along with the instructions on how to add the service to your reminder emails.

Lastly, we are working on a redesign of our public website (http://www.pencilem.com). We are hoping to launch this website this week, so stay tuned for that. As always, comments are appreciated!

Inline appointment Canceling

Greg — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:33:27 +0000

We’ve added a simple but useful feature today to Pencil’em Desktop that will allow you to cancel an appointment from the main scheduling page, so you don’t have to go to the “Edit Appointments” tab. As you hover your mouse over the appointment details of any appointment on the main scheduling page, you will notice a new “Cancel Appt.” button appears. To cancel the appointment, click this new “Canel Appt.” button, and then confirm the cancelation by clicking “Yes, Cancel It” on the cancelation prompt. That’s all there is to it! See the image below for an example of this new feature.

New inline appointment Cancelation.

NOTE: This feature is not available if you are using Internet Explorer 6. If you are still using Internet Explorer 6, we suggest you give this article a read, and upgrade to a more modern browser.