Scheduling and managing appointments

When you sign in to your SimplePractice account, you’ll be taken to your calendar, where you can view and manage appointments for your practice.

In this guide, we'll cover:

• Creating an appointment
• Editing an appointment
• Editing a locked appointment
• Using suggested times
• Deleting an appointment
• Deleting a locked appointment
• Managing future appointments from the client’s Overview page

Note: To learn how to manage your calendar as part of a group practice, see Using your calendar in a group practice.

Creating an appointment

Note: The steps in this section cover the creation of an appointment for an individual or couple client. If you'd like to make a group appointment, see Setting up group appointments.

To create a new appointment:

1. Navigate to your calendar 
2. Click + > Schedule appointment

Tip: You can also click anywhere on the calendar to create an appointment.

3. On the Appointment flyout, select an existing client from the dropdown menu or click + Create client to create a new client 

4. Set the date, start time, end time, and duration of the appointment
   • You can select Suggested times to quickly determine this for your client's appointment
     • To do this, see Using suggested times

Note: You can also create an All day client appointment by checking the All day box. To learn more, see Creating a calendar event.

5. If your practice has multiple clinicians, select a Clinician from the dropdown menu
   • For existing clients, this will default to the primary clinician assigned to that client

6. Select a Location from the dropdown menu if you have multiple practice locations 
   • If this is a telehealth appointment , select the Video Office location

Note: For more information on recurring appointments, see Managing recurring appointments.

7. Click Add memo to include a note for the appointment
   • Memos are optional free-text notes you can use to add contextual information for yourself or team members, such as reminders, billing notes, or Telehealth links
8. Update the service code from the Services and modifiers dropdown menu and adjust the Fee as needed
9. Click Save

If you’d like to duplicate an appointment, you can click the duplicate icon.

After clicking this, you can quickly create a new appointment with the same details of the existing appointment, except the Recurring status. If the new appointment should be Recurring, you can check this manually. 

For more information, see Managing recurring appointments.

Editing an appointment

You can edit an existing appointment to update details such as the date, time, service, fee, or clinician. If the appointment is part of a recurring series, you’ll also be able to choose how those changes apply.

To edit an appointment:

1. Navigate to your calendar 
2. Select the appointment you need to edit

3. Edit the appointment details, as needed
   • Click Suggested times to quickly determine a new time for your client's appointment
     • To do this, see Using suggested times
4. Click Save

If the appointment is part of a recurring series, confirm whether you want the changes to apply to just this appointment or to all appointments in the series.

After you’ve made your selection, click Save.

Note: If you edit the fee for an appointment that already has an invoice attached, a new invoice is needed to update your client’s balance. You can manually create a new invoice for this appointment, or have it automatically created as a fee adjustment invoice if you have automatic invoicing enabled.

Editing a locked appointment

If an appointment is locked, you won’t be able to edit its details. An appointment is considered locked if there’s a superbill attached or if there’s a locked and signed progress note.

To unlock and edit a locked appointment:

1. Navigate to your calendar 
2. Determine whether the appointment has documentation associated with it
   • If the appointment has a superbill attached, you can delete the billing document by opening it and clicking the trash can icon
   • If the appointment has a locked progress note, you can unlock the note by clicking Unlock

3. Edit the appointment, as needed

After unlocking and editing the appointment, you can lock it again by recreating any invoices or superbills. For detailed instructions, see Creating invoices and Creating superbills. If you unlocked a progress note, you can also re-lock and sign it again.

Note: To learn more about locking and unlocking progress notes, see Adding progress notes for individual appointments.

Using suggested times

When you’re creating a new appointment for a client, or editing an existing appointment of theirs, you can click Suggested times to automatically determine the next available time slots for the client. 

Click the time slot to automatically update the appointment’s date and time to match the time slot.

Note: Time slots are offered starting from the hour (:00) or half-hour (:30). This can’t be customized.

Under the date of a time slot, you may see “for [NUMBER] weeks”. This indicates that the same time slot is available for the next [NUMBER] consecutive weeks. 

For example, if Tuesday, Mar 31 is available for 2 weeks, this means that Tuesday, Apr 7 and Tuesday, Apr 14 are also available. 

If you’d like to view more time slots, click Show more. 

You can view available time slots for up to 10 weeks after the current date assigned to the appointment.

Note: Suggested times is currently not available for group appointments.

What determines the suggested times available for an appointment?

If online appointment requests aren’t enabled, available time slots are solely based on the empty spaces between the earliest and latest times displayed on the calendar.

Note: To determine the earliest and latest times displayed on the calendar, you can navigate to the gear icon > Calendar preferences and adjust the times under Display. For more information, see Customizing the calendar view.

To be empty, a space must not have an event or out of office block assigned to the clinician. If a space contains an appointment with a canceled or late canceled status, it will also be considered empty.  

If online appointment requests are enabled, suggested times will only be provided for appointments that have a location and service code(s) associated with the clinician’s availability. 

Note: To determine which service code(s) and location(s) are associated with a clinician’s availability, see Managing your availability blocks.

Only empty spaces within the clinician’s availability will be suggested as potential time slots.

Deleting an appointment

You can delete appointments from your calendar when they’re no longer needed. Once an appointment is deleted, this action can’t be undone.

Important: When deleting a recurring series, selecting All of the series, including past appointments will delete all past appointments without an attached progress note or invoice. Attached claims will be retained, but all other details will be removed.

To delete an appointment:

1. Navigate to your calendar 
2. Select the appointment
3. Click the trash can icon

4. Select Delete to confirm

Note: There isn’t a way to delete appointments for multiple clients at once. Each appointment must be deleted individually from the appointment flyout.

Deleting a locked appointment

If an appointment is locked, you won’t be able to delete it. An appointment is considered locked if there’s a superbill attached or if there’s a locked and signed progress note.

For steps on how to handle these documents, see Editing an appointment.

Important: This modal will link to documents that you have access to. If you don’t have access, the modal will indicate which team members do have access to the documents in question.

Access to view and delete documents associated with an appointment depends on your team member permissions. If you don’t have permission to delete an appointment, the trash can icon won’t appear on the appointment.

Prior to deleting documents, we recommend contacting the client’s clinician(s), the Account Owner, or a clinician with entire practice access to review the documentation attached to the appointment. Once the documentation is removed and your permissions allow it, you can delete the appointment.

Note: For more information on team member permissions, see Clinician roles available for team members.

Managing future appointments from the client’s Overview page

If a client doesn’t have any appointments scheduled, a banner will appear at the top of the client’s Overview page with the following options: 

• Click Schedule more to quickly navigate to the calendar and create appointments for the client
• Click mark client inactive if no further appointments are intended for the client
  • For more information on the inactive status, see Making a client inactive

If you update the client’s Billing type or Copay in the client’s Overview > Edit > Billing and Insurance tab, this will automatically apply to the client’s future appointments.

Note: For more information about editing client billing information, see Billing and Insurance.

Updates to a client’s default services will not apply to future appointments. These appointments would need to be recreated or updated to the correct service. For more information, see Editing an appointment.

Note: To learn how to make billing-related changes for client appointments, see Appointment level billing changes.