Imagine this…
A prospective client finds you online and starts to peruse your website. They look through your services and reviews. They like what they see, so they decide to book an appointment with you. But wait?! There’s nowhere to easily schedule a quick call or meeting. They don’t want to go through the hassle of back-and-forth emails just to get 15 minutes of face time with you. Your prospective client exits your webpage and moves on to find a firm with a website where they can put something solid on their calendar.
Setting up an appointment booking page will help put more calls with prospective clients on your calendar. You can always pay for a software or website plugin that allows you to create a scheduling page. However, Google Workspace offers the same features for free. And, it’s incredibly easy to set up and customize based on your availability.
With Google Calendar’s Appointment Schedule You Can:
- Create A Professional Booking Page For Your Accounting Firm
- Customize & Update Your Appointment Availability
- Set Appointment Reminders For You And Your Clients
- Cap the Daily Number of Meetings
- Establish “Buffer” Times Between Booked Appointments
Google Workspace’s Appointment Schedule Feature For Your Accounting Firm
The first step to creating an appointment booking page for your accounting firm is to create your appointment schedule. It’s a pretty simple process, but we’ll walk you through it now.
How to Create An Appointment Schedule
Step 1: Go to your Google calendar.
Step 2: At the top left, select “Create” and then click “Appointment Schedule” and enter a title. Keep in mind that the title you choose will be visible to anyone who visits your booking page. Choose something simple, like “XYZ Tax Booking Page.” Click “Next.”
Step 3: Now, you can customize your appointment booking page. Set the appointment duration (15-minute minimum), and availability, set a specific scheduling window to determine how far in advance appointments can be booked, and change the basic color of your calendar to match your firm’s logo or website. Once you’ve adjusted all of these features, click “Next.”
Step 4: Here, you can edit what information clients are required to send to you beforehand, whether or not you want to set appointment reminders and how far in advance they should be sent. You can also use the “Booking page photo and name” feature to see and change how you’ll appear to to page visitors. When you’re ready, click save.
The next step to creating an appointment booking page is to share it so that your prospective clients can find it. Here’s a quick guide on how to share your appointment schedule on your website.
How to Publish Your Appointment Schedule
Step 1: Go to your Google calendar.
Step 2: On your Calendar grid, click the appointment schedule.
Step 3: Click share. Here, you’ll see two different options, all appointment schedules or single booking page. For now, click on the single booking page, and select the appointment schedule you just created.
Step 4: Click copy link, and you now can add a schedule button to your website, that takes your clients to your custom booking page.
If you want to know how to embed the calendar onto your website, we suggest following Google’s own guide here.
What Else Are We Looking Forward To With The Google Workspace Calendar?
Google’s constantly adding new features, just like this one, to their professional working spaces. And more often than not, these tools can be used to elevate your accounting firm. In the future, we hope to see Integrations with video-conferencing software outside of the Google suite, like Zoom and Skype. We’ll also keep an eye out for more design customization options that allow firm owners to edit the calendar with their brand colors.
What we don’t expect to see from Google Calendar is built-in lead generation. If you want a system that does the work for you (builds you a custom website, creates a bookable calendar, and reaches out to your dream clients to put appointments on that calendar) you should look into our Create Your Dream Firm program. You’ll have to prep yourself and your firm for scalable growth, but we’ll help bring the clients to your door. Take a look at some of our reviews here, and make a decision that will change the future of your firm.
