Insights on scheduling, productivity, and building open software

A veterinary practice can have plenty of software and still feel like it is working around the system. One feature handles records beautifully, another makes scheduling painful, and a third promises automation nobody has time to learn. For owners and managers, the real challenge is finding veterinary practice management software that supports the work their teams do every day.

Both Cal.com and Calendly offer APIs. However, they vary significantly in their function and capabilities. To explain briefly, the Calendly API is good if you want to automate an existing scheduling setup that’s built around Calendly. Cal.com is much more flexible. It allows you the ability to build scheduling directly into any digital product or service.

In the immortal words of Meek Mill, “there’s levels to this game,” and Cal.com operates on a level of its own. The Cal.com API is not only more flexible, but it can even be programmed to create new custom calls that are specific to your workflow. This is the level of flexibility and customization that you expect from enterprise-level software, but there are very few scheduling engines globally that offer comparable features, let alone go beyond the Cal.com API.

If your team uses Outlook every day, you want every booking to land straight on your calendar without adding more Microsoft software than you'd like. The best Outlook calendar booking software overall is Cal.com. It syncs natively with Outlook, connects just as easily with Google and Apple calendars, and stays free to start. Microsoft Bookings is the natural pick if your entire team already runs on Microsoft 365 and you'd rather not add another tool to the stack.

No-shows are a major operational challenge for service-based businesses. The fastest way to reduce no-shows is automated reminders, easy rescheduling, and deposits at booking, all built into Cal.com; free to start. So, that basically answers how to reduce no-show appointments, but just knowing the solutions is often not enough to actually solve a problem. Execution of the solutions plays a major role in determining how much success you’re able to achieve from the mentioned solutions.

One of the primary problems anyone who uses scheduling software faces isn’t finding a tool that has the right features. It is usually finding a tool that appropriately fits into their workflow. 

Calendly is a popular online scheduling tool known and loved for its simplicity. However, that’s a double-edged sword; the very feature that makes it appealing to non-tech background consumers makes it a bit of an underwhelming performer for businesses and product teams.

You lose a prospect every time a discovery call turns into five emails about time zones. You lose a paid hour every time a client no-shows on a consultation you blocked your morning for. And you lose your evening every time you copy your availability into yet another email instead of working. This is the tax freelancers pay for not having the right booking app, and it adds up fast when you are the one running sales, delivery, and admin by yourself.

You're a coach. Your job is to coach, not to spend your day requesting that a client reschedule a missed discovery call, troubleshooting a time zone mix-up, or manually sending a payment link after a session has already happened.

Most telehealth scheduling tools were not built for healthcare. You’ll figure that out quickly when a patient books an online 24/7 urgent care service through your generic telemedicine services tool, their information moves through a system without a Business Associate Agreement (BAA), and your front desk gets a compliance question that nobody has a clean answer to. Put simply, picking the wrong tool creates liability.