Recurring

This feature is very advanced scheduling and best explained by way of an example.

The horse is required to be treated on a regular basis over a long period. The client may prefer certain periods and dates for treatment. We can set up the definition on the horse record and then book a series of appointments over a period for this horse and either leave it at that, or add a new appointment to the list every time an appointment has been completed. This is in effect a continually rolling block booking.

The first thing to do is to go to the Preference/Appointments.

On the client screen is the facility for recurring appointments. Note that when adding a new client the default values will be added for a quick start and the “from date” is set to today’s date. You can change these of course if you want.

You can now select the recurring criteria which provides a huge range of flexibility.

Having done that you can now press the button to copy these settings to the horse records. This is because appointments are made for a horse, not a client. For every horse the client owns, the recurring settings are copied to the horse record.

However if the client is actually a stable owner, then that client may have their own horses listed at the stable together with a other clients' horses. In this case the system will detect this and ask you if you want to copy the settings to just the horses owned by the client or to all the horse records at the stables.

We have kept the visible overlapping appointment facility so you can see where appointments clash and change those manually using drag and drop on the appointments screen. All these appointments are also “tagged” with a note indicating clearly that they were created using this facility and will appear in the reminders area as normal. The appointments area on the client and horse records will show these appointments very clearly

So now we have the horse records with the settings copied we can now go to the horse record.