Calendar Settings - Sync your Calendar to Lawmatics
Syncing your external calendar to Lawmatics will help you manage your appointments, plus unlock the very useful features of appointment requests and booking links.
If you want to use appointment requests or booking links, allowing clients to book their own appointments based on your availability, you will need to sync a calendar.
The calendar sync is an individual user setting, so each of your firm's Lawmatics users can sync their own calendar. Each user can also send out an appointment request or booking link on behalf of another user, selecting which user's calendar availability should be used. So even if you don't plan on sending out your requests, you should still sync your calendar so that a request could be sent on your behalf by another firm user as needed.
You’ll start by going to Settings -> Calendar, then click Connect Calendar.
Then select your calendar provider from the list provided. We can sync with any of the following options:
If you are syncing an Office 365 calendar, you will also need to make sure that you have admin privileges. If you don’t, you’ll need to share this link with the appropriate person at your firm who is the admin on the account: https://app.cronofy.com/oauth/authorize/admin/office365?client_id=D_SMNVnpY_xdAXzJ3Q-7j8L1Th5ImpBD
If you are syncing an iCloud calendar, you will need to generate an app specific password. Follow the instructions found here to do so.
Once you have selected your provider you will be prompted to agree to the terms of service and sign in to your account for that calendar. This will not be your Lawmatics login credentials, but rather your credentials for the calendar provider.
Once your calendar has been synced, you should see a screen similar to the one below:
If you have more than one calendar being used on your external provider (for example, you might have work, personal, holidays, birthdays, etc) you can select which of these you want to be used to sync appointments, and which should be used to pull availability.
Any appointments booked through Lawmatics where you are an attendee will be automatically placed onto the calendar chosen for ‘sync appointments to’. If you are using our Appointment Request feature, clients will only be able to book you at times when you are free on all calendars selected in the ‘calendars to pull availability’ option.
You might only have the one calendar, as you see in the screenshot above, which is perfectly fine.
We recommend enabling two-way sync (shown in the image below). Two way sync will NOT sync all appointments from your external calendar into Lawmatics. Rather, it will allow Lawmatics to reflect updates made externally. In other words, if you book an appointment through Lawmatics, which syncs onto your external calendar, and then you edit/delete that appointment in your external calendar, those updates will be reflected in Lawmatics.
The rest of the settings on this page all relate to setting your availability for appointment requests and booking links. If you do not plan on using those features, you can disregard the rest of the settings.
If you do think you will want to use one or both of those features, then you will want to make sure you set your availability options accordingly. First, feel free to set in your working hours, these will be used in addition to your existing appointments to set your availability.
Use the dropdown menus to set your working hours for each day. If you would like to create separate time ranges for a particular day, use the plus sign icon on the right to add another range. If you would like to remove a day of the week from your availability, click the trash can icon on the right for that day.
You can also feel free to set in a lunch hour, buffer time, rolling period, and time before.
- Lunch Hour: Set a designated lunch hour when you will be unavailable every day of the week, if applicable
- Time Before: This setting will limit how soon you can be booked, if you want to be able to be booked same day, next day, 1 week out, or any other custom amount of time.
- Buffer Time: Set a length of buffer time between appointments
- Rolling Period: This determines how far out in the future you could be booked. For example, if you want someone to be able to book a maximum of 2 weeks in advance, then 2 weeks would be your rolling period.
- Start Interval: Determines the frequency at which appointment booking slots begin, such as options every 15 minutes or 30 minutes, etc.
You will also see the option to set custom Appointment Type Availability. Learn more about that option here.
Lastly, you will also see the options sync and unsync future appointments.
If you are new to Lawmatics and do not have any appointments booked in Lawmatics yet, you can disregard this option. If you already have appointments booked in Lawmatics, and are just syncing a calendar for the first time or syncing a new calendar, then you can use the Sync Existing Future Appointments to sync those appointments onto the newly connected calendar.
If you already have Lawmatics appointments booked, and want to remove them from the synced calendar, then click the Unsync option.
FAQ's
How long should it take for appointments to sync from Lawmatics to my connected calendar?
They should sync nearly instantly.
What should I do if I booked an appointment and I don't see it sync onto my connected calendar?
First, make sure that the appointment is in fact booked with you as the meeting host. Then make sure that you are checking the correct calendar account that you have synced to Lawmatics, and that you are viewing the specific calendar you have selected for the Sync Appointments To option. If those things check out, then your next troubleshooting step would be to disconnect and reconnect your calendar and try it again. Note: when you disconnect your calendar you will need to reset your availability hours and other settings.
I am trying to disconnect my connected calendar but getting a message that I can't disconnect because "Automations that use Appointment Requests currently exist.", what should I do?
You can't disconnect your calendar while you have automations using appointment requests, because without your calendar connected you are at risk for getting booked at a time when you are not available. You can email us at support@lawmatics.com and request to have your calendar disconnected from the back end, and our team will be able to help you out.