Managing prospective clients on the Inquiries page

The Inquiries page allows you to view all of your prospective clients in one place. If you’re accepting new clients, you can use the Inquiries page to view and manage inquiries from various sources, including contact forms on Therapy Finder, the Professional Website, and the Client Portal.

In this guide, we'll cover:

• Using the Inquiries page
• Adding prospective clients to the Inquiries page
• Managing your prospective clients
• Turning on the contact form
• FAQs

Using the Inquiries page

To access the Inquiries page:

1. Navigate to the Calendar
2. Select Inquiries from the left navigation menu

For each prospective client, you’ll see the following information:

• Name
• Contact
  • This will include the prospective client's phone number and email, if provided, which you can use if following up with them outside of SimplePractice
• Billing type
• Preferred clinician, if you're part of a group practice
• Status
  • Appointment statuses include:
    • No upcoming appointments
    • Pending request
    • Scheduled
    • Canceled
  • Document statuses include:
    • Documents incomplete
    • Documents complete
• Date added
  • The time and source of the appointment request or inquiry, if applicable
• Actions
  • To learn more, see Managing your prospective clients

In a group practice, Account Owners, practice managers, practice schedulers, and clinicians can access the Inquiries page. Additionally, Account Owners, practice managers, practice schedulers, clinicians with entire practice access, and clinicians with full client list access have the ability to view and manage all prospective clients from this page. To learn more, see Who can view contact form inquiries in a group practice?

Adding prospective clients to the Inquiries page

You can manually add a prospective client to the Inquiries page to track them more effectively. To do this:

1. Click the + icon
2. Select + Create client

Tip: You can also add a prospective client directly from the Inquiries page by clicking Add prospective client in the top right.

3. Enter the prospective client’s details
4. Select Prospective under the Status dropdown

5. Click Continue
6. Return to the Inquiries page to view the prospective client

Note: To learn more about adding clients, see Adding a new client and navigating your Clients and contacts list.

Additionally, a prospective client profile is automatically created when someone new to your practice submits a contact form inquiry or appointment request. These profiles will appear on the Inquiries page, which you can take further actions for through the Actions menu. For more information, see Using the Actions menu.

Managing your prospective clients

The Inquiries page lets you manage prospective clients and view their onboarding progress in one place.

Viewing client details in the inquiry flyout

You can click into a row to view details about the prospective client. This opens a flyout where you can manage their Client preferences, such as billing type, clinician, and location, their Intake progress checklist, and Tasks you create for the inquiry.

The Intake progress checklist includes:

• Prescreener
  • If the prospective client completed a prescreener or submitted a contact form inquiry, click Review to view their answers
• Intake documents
  • Click Share to send intake documents for the prospective client to complete via the Client Portal
• Appointment
  • You can either click Schedule to schedule an appointment, or select the dropdown > Send link to schedule
  • If you choose Send link to schedule, the prospective client will receive an email prompting them to request an appointment via the Client Portal
    • The Send link to schedule option only appears if:
      • New client appointment requests are enabled
      • You have availability that new clients can request
      • You're assigned as the preferred clinician for the prospective client, if you're part of a group practice. If the client isn’t assigned to a clinician, you’ll need to select one before sending the scheduling link
• Appointment request
  • If the prospective client has a pending appointment request, click Review to view it and either Accept the request or click More to Decline, Reschedule, or View on calendar

In addition to the intake checklist, the Tasks section lets you create and manage tasks related to the inquiry, such as follow-ups or steps in the onboarding process. To add a task, select Create task.

This opens the task creation flyout, where you can enter the task name, description, due date, priority, and assignee, and add attachments.

Once you click Save, it appears in the Tasks section of the inquiry flyout, as well as in the Tasks tab in the left navigation menu.

Note: To learn more about tasks, see Managing tasks through the Tasks tab.

At the bottom of the inquiry flyout, you can use the Activity and Notes tabs to view onboarding activity and add internal notes about the prospective client.

The Activity tab displays a timeline of key onboarding actions, such as form submissions and appointment updates. The Notes tab allows you to leave internal notes that are only visible to your team.

These notes can also be found on the client Overview page by filtering for Inquiries notes.

When adding a note, you can mention a team member using @name to bring their attention to something specific.

Once your note is complete, click Save note.

Mentioned users will receive both a notification in their account and an email. Team members can manage their notification preferences. To do this:

1. Navigate to Settings > Profile > Notification preferences
2. Toggle Mentioned in inquiry notes on or off under the Client management and Emails sections

Using the Actions menu

You can also take actions on a prospective client directly from the Inquiries page. To do this, click the three horizontal dots under Actions.

Under Actions, you can choose to:

• Share intake documents
  • To customize the Welcome email template, navigate to Settings > Client notifications > Email
  • For more information, see Sending intake forms and documents to clients
• Schedule appointment
  • To learn more, see Scheduling a client appointment
• Send link to schedule
  • This option only appears if:
    • New client appointment requests are enabled
    • You have availability that new clients can request
    • You're assigned as the preferred clinician for the prospective client, if you're part of a group practice
• Send Referrals
  • You can refer the client to other SimplePractice clinicians who are listed in the Therapy Finder Directory
  • For more information, see Sending and receiving Clinician Referrals
• Make client active
  • This will move the client to your active Clients list and remove them from the Inquiries page
• Archive client
  • This will archive the prospective client's profile and remove them from the Inquiries page
  • To learn more about the Archived client status, see Client Status
• Delete client
  • This will permanently delete their client profile and remove them from the Inquiries page
  • For more information, see Deleting a client
• View client details
  • This will take you to the prospective client's inquiry flyout

Note: If you’d prefer to move the prospective client to your waitlist, you’ll first need to make them Active to remove them from the Inquiries page. To learn more, see My caseload is full. Can I waitlist a prospective client?

Turning on the contact form

To allow prospective clients to reach out to you, you can enable the contact form. This form lets prospective clients submit inquiries through your Client Portal, Professional Website, Therapy Finder profile, or external website. These submissions can be viewed on the Inquiries page.

Account Owners, practice managers, and clinicians with administrative access can enable the contact form for the practice. To enable this from the Inquiries page:

1. Click the gear icon in the top right corner

2. Select Contact form

Tip: You can toggle on Accepting new clients to show this status on Therapy Finder and your Professional Website. This setting must be turned on for new clients to view your availability and request appointments online.

3. Toggle on the Contact form

4. Click Close

Clinicians who don’t have administrative access will be able to toggle on their individual Therapy Finder contact form settings from this flyout, if Therapy Finder is enabled for them.

Note: To learn more, see Clinician roles available for team members.

To view all contact form settings, navigate to Settings > Scheduling and inquiries > Contact form. For more information, see Managing the integrated contact form.

FAQs

• What’s the difference between the Requests and Inquiries pages?
• What does the Inquiries notification number represent?
• My caseload is full. Can I waitlist a prospective client?
• How do I remove a client from the Inquiries page?

What’s the difference between the Requests and Inquiries pages?

The Requests page is where you manage online appointment requests from both prospective and existing clients. From this page, you can accept or decline these requests.

The Inquiries page lists all clients with the Prospective status. It includes online appointment requests from prospective clients and prospective client inquiries submitted through the contact form. From this page, you can view prospective client details, share intake documents, schedule appointments, archive the client, or make them active.

What does the Inquiries notification number represent?

When a new client profile with the Prospective status is added to your account, you’ll see a notification badge appear next to Inquiries in the left navigation menu.

The number displayed in the notification badge reflects the total number of prospective clients on your Inquiries list, not the number of new inquiries received.

My caseload is full. Can I waitlist a prospective client?

Yes, even if your caseload is full, you can still accept inquiries from prospective clients and move them to your waitlist. However, to move a prospective client to the waitlist, you’ll first need to make them active. This allows you to manage interest and keep clients organized for future availability. To do this from the Inquiries page:

1. Click the three horizontal dots under Actions
2. Select Make client active

1. Navigate to the Calendar > Waitlist
2. Click Add client

1. Select Add existing client

1. Search the client’s name and select their profile
2. Add additional waitlist details
3. Click Save

Note: The client waitlist is only available on the Plus plan. To learn more, see Managing the client waitlist.

How do I remove a client from the Inquiries page?

To remove a client from the Inquiries page, you can do any of the following:

• Make them an active client
• Move them to your waitlist
  • For more information, see My caseload is full. Can I waitlist a prospective client?
• Delete their profile
• Archive their profile

Note: Prospective clients won’t automatically update to Active if you schedule an appointment with them. You’ll need to manually update their status to Active.