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There are so many times when you want to give a client the option to book a paid appointment with you RIGHT from the start of the process in Dubsado- you know, like when photographers want to offer Mini Sessions, or when interior designers want to offer Consultations, or consultants/copywriters/web designers want to offer Strategy Sessions, or when mobile bar owners want to offer Cocktail Tastings, or when brand designers (or anyone else) wants to offer VIP Days… I could go on and on! That said, there are a MILLION nuances and things that you need to know in order to use a scheduler effectively for literally any of this, which is why I’ve created this guide to using a paid Dubsado Scheduler. Even though this “guide” is really just a regular ol’ blog, it’s one I’ll be coming back to regularly and adding to as questions, updates, and common mistakes come up!
There are lots of caveats and nuances to HOW the following is accomplished, but it’s important for you to know the big picture of what we’re working toward here:
I highly recommend making sure that the actual title of your paid scheduler not only says what type of appointment it is, but that it also says the COST of the appointment. Any time a client selects a time on the scheduler and moves to the form tab, it’s going to create an OPEN INVOICE in your Dubsado, but there won’t even be any client information tied to it at that point! So if they don’t know the price, they’re going to click until they find it, at which point they’ll back out of the process, and you’ll have a bunch of open invoices you have to delete (and you might think you have more money coming in than you really do). Simply putting the cost of the appointment in the title is a way to cut down on this issue. Here are a few examples of how I would title common schedulers:
Strategy Session – $347
Christmas Mini Session: $250
In Home Consultation | $400
As long as the name of the appointment AND the price is included, you’ll have to clear out those pesky fake open invoices less often, but you’ll still want to keep an eye on it either way! You can check by going to your Dubsado Dashboard and clicking on the “Open Invoices” statistic. It will take you to a list of open invoices and you can delete any that don’t have any client or project information attached to them. That means the client didn’t fill in information and wasn’t serious about booking!
In order for a scheduler to be the FIRST step a client takes in your process (whether paid or not), you MUST have either a LEAD CAPTURE *or* a PUBLIC PROPOSAL attached. Attaching a questionnaire or a proposal that is not set up to be public will NOT create a new project and will NOT kick off a workflow.
If the appointment is free to book, like a Discovery Call, then you would want to attach a lead capture to the scheduler in order to create the project and kick off the workflow.
If the appointment is to be paid, then it must be a PUBLIC PROPOSAL attached to the scheduler rather than the lead capture. This will still create the project and kick off the workflow (assuming everything is set up correctly, which I’ll detail later in this guide.)
The workflow begins as soon as the ATTACHED FORM is submitted, NOT whenever the appointment is paid for. This means that someone could have a PROJECT and a WORKFLOW in your Dubsado account, but they may have abandoned the booking process when it got to the payment step.
The reason that it must be a public proposal instead of a lead capture is that using a public proposal is the only way to make sure that the invoice created for booking the appointment is automatically marked as PRIMARY. The invoice must be marked as primary in order for your workflow to be able to watch whether or not the invoice is paid, which prevents workflow steps from firing if a lead abandoned the process at the payment step (and therefore are not actually booked)
Since you now know that you HAVE to have a Public Proposal attached rather than a lead capture, this also opens up another set of choices you have to make when using Dubsado to schedule a paid appointment: whether to generate an invoice from the PROPOSAL or whether to generate it from the Scheduler Deposit Invoice settings.
If you require payment in order to book the appointment, then you’ll need to use the SCHEDULER DEPOSIT INVOICE, which means that you have to put the COST of the appointment as static information in those settings. If you don’t put in the static price on the Scheduler Deposit Invoice, then clients will end up being able to reserve time on your calendar WITHOUT paying, which is not what we want.
Unfortunately, this means that you can NOT allow clients to pick among packages on the proposal that you have to have attached, the cost must be set. There is a workaround to allow client to choose between packages, which I will detail in a later section.
Simply put, because that’s just the way Dubsado works. As described in the section above, we have to use the proposal in order to make sure we can make our WORKFLOW work properly. However, we are not able to use some of its best features, like using multiple packages or attaching a contract, when it’s attached to a paid scheduler.
There is no way to have a contract attached to a scheduler, which means there’s no way to secure a formal digital signature at this stage in the process. You have a few options for how to move forward:
Okay way back up there, I said that there IS a workaround for allowing clients to choose among multiple packages even though we can’t utilize that feature on a proposal. An example of needing to do this might be if you are a photographer and you want your clients to be able to select their session length and pay accordingly.
If you want clients to have a choice among packages, then you’ll simply need to create a paid scheduler for EACH package you want to offer. Depending on how you are using your proposal, this may mean that you need to have individual proposals for EACH package as well. You’ll fill in the cost of each package on the Scheduler Deposit Invoice and make sure the scheduler title includes the cost of the appointment, just like in your original one. Don’t forget to change which workflow is hooked up to the proposal, if necessary!
Once you’ve created all of the individual paid scheduler variations, you will then create a SCHEDULER GROUP that you can embed on your website. The Scheduler Group will contain all schedulers that you dictate, so the client will be able to preview them and select which type of appointment they want to book.
Okay so this is one of the biggest problems with using a paid Dubsado scheduler IMHO. The best way to do this, is to require the appointment to be paid in full up front. There is no reasonably solid way to offer any kind of payment plan.
Now to be transparent, are there possibly *some* ways to figure out how to work-around these limitations? Yes. BUT, in my (very strong) opinion, they’re not worth the trade offs they come with. It either involves manual work on your part, delaying the entire experience to give you time to do those manual tasks, asking your clients to put in the same information multiple times, or creating copious numbers of duplicate assets in your Dubsado account which could lead to confusion and general clutteriness. In general, for quickly-booked appointments that cost less than $1000, it’s simply not worth the tradeoffs to offer a payment plan. If your offer is more than $1000, then I would alter this process so they are picking their package and getting their contract/payment plan through a regular proposal/contract/invoice process and then sending the scheduler for them to pick their day & time after they’ve booked.
Dubsado released some recent changes where you MUST have a public proposal attached to a scheduler in order for the workflow that starts upon project creation to continue ONLY if the invoice is paid in full. This WILL NOT WORK with a Lead Capture!
Even though I knew about this change from Lead Capture to Public Proposal, I completely forgot to go in and edit my OWN account, which meant that some workflows did not fire as expected. Don’t be like me! Go in and update your account NOW!
We can tackle that in a Strategy Session! Book here (and observe how it works from the client side)!
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