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

1. First, navigate to the “Services” page in the main menu.
2. Click on the first Service in your service list that you would like to make appear in the confirmation / reminder email
3. Click on the “Edit this Service” button and the Edit Service dialog form will appear.
4. 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”.
5. Click “Save Changes” on the dialog box to save the changes.
6. 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.

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We’ve released a small update we think will make your life a little easier.  In an effort to make Pencil’em function more like your written appointment book, we have removed the required email address when adding your clients.  This now will allow you to schedule appointments for clients that do not have an email address or that do not want to receive email reminders.

We’ve also added a client birthday field so you will never forget another client’s birthday again!  When you create an appointment on a client’s birthday the system will now display the birthday cake icon next to the client name (see image below).  We are working on some more features related to client birthdays that we will be releasing in the future so stay tuned for those.  Also of note, you will see the service price on the main scheduling screen so you know how much you are charging for a specific appointment.

Service Prices on scheduling screen, and Birthday Icons.

We also made a minor adjustment to the “Main Scheduling” page, where the “Select Date” field is now the first thing you select when creating an appointment.  Not a major change, but it makes it easier to see what appointments you have for any given day sooner in the booking process.

As always, lots more to come so keep an eye on the blog and let us know how we are doing in the comments!