Online Booking

Online booking is review-and-approve: clients request times, you get the final say, and nothing lands on your calendar without you. Existing clients request through the client portal; prospective clients use your public booking page — reachable directly or through a button widget embedded on your own website.

Turning on online booking

1. Go to Settings → Online Booking.
2. Turn on Accept Online Booking Requests — this is your personal switch for portal requests from existing clients. Set your bookable hours while you're here — see Availability.
3. To take requests from new prospects too, turn on Accept Requests from New Clients (practice-wide; owners and practice managers only), and optionally Allow couples requests.
4. Click Save Changes.

Your public booking page lives at your practice's portal address (your-practice.securehealth.me/book). The portal address is set once in Settings → Patient Portal — the Widgets page will warn you if it's missing.

Setting your cancellation policy

Decide whether clients can cancel their own confirmed appointments from the portal, and how much notice they must give:

1. Go to Settings → Online Booking and find Cancellation Policy (owners and practice managers only).
2. Choose Clients must contact the practice (the default — no online cancellation), or a notice window: at least 24, 48, or 72 hours.

With a window set, clients see a Cancel Appointment button on upcoming appointments until the window closes; after that the portal tells them to contact you. When a client cancels, the appointment is marked Cancelled with a Client canceled note on your calendar, any planned charge for the session is released, and you get an email. Clients can never cancel inside your window or cancel couples, family, or group sessions online — those always come through you, and you decide how to handle them (see the appointment's status menu).

The policy line ("This practice requires at least 24 hours' notice to cancel") also appears to clients when they book, so the expectation is set up front. State your full policy — including any late-cancellation fee — in your consent paperwork; to charge a late fee today, add a product line to an invoice (Settings → Products).

Adding the booking widget to your website

1. Go to Settings → Widgets, Appointment request tab.
2. In the clinician table, pick the Practice-wide row (visitors choose their clinician) or a specific clinician's row (bookings go only to them).
3. Click Copy code.
4. Paste the snippet into your website's HTML where the button should appear.
5. Click Preview Widget to see exactly what visitors will get.

The widget renders a single button; clicking it opens your booking page in an overlay, so visitors never leave your site. The Contact form tab generates a second widget that opens your contact/inquiry form instead — you can put both on the same page (include the <script> line only once).

Customizing the widget

The generated snippet supports a few optional attributes you can add to the <div> by hand:

Attribute	What it does	Default
data-button-text	The button's label	"Request Appointment" (booking) / "Contact Us" (contact)
data-button-color	The button's background color — a hex value like #2b8a3e or a CSS color name like seagreen	#228be6 (blue)
data-type="contact"	Makes the button open the contact form instead of the booking page (the generated Contact Form snippet already includes this)	booking
data-practitioner	Limits booking to one specific clinician — set automatically when you pick a clinician in Settings → Widgets before copying the code	all accepting clinicians

For example, a green button that reads "Schedule with me":

<div id="ph-booking-widget"
     data-ph-widget
     data-slug="your-practice"
     data-button-text="Schedule with me"
     data-button-color="#2b8a3e">
</div>
<script src="https://widget.practiceharbor.com/booking.js"></script>

The button inherits your site's font and can be further restyled with your own CSS by targeting the container div. The pop-up dialog is keyboard- and screen-reader-accessible: it announces itself as a dialog, keeps keyboard focus inside while open, and closes with the Escape key or the close button.

Choosing which clinicians take new clients

The Widgets clinician table has an Accepting New Clients? switch per clinician:

• Every clinician can flip their own switch.
• Flipping a colleague's switch requires a practice owner or manager.
• A clinician also needs their own online booking turned on for any times to actually show — the switch here controls whether they're offered to new clients.

What prospective clients see

The booking page walks a new client through, step by step:

1. Provider — pick a clinician (skipped when the widget targets one clinician).
2. Service — your bookable services, with duration and price.
3. Location — only if the practice has more than one.
4. Date & time — a calendar dotted with available days (starting tomorrow — same-day requests aren't offered), then morning/afternoon/evening time slots.
5. Screening — your prescreener questionnaire, if you've set one up.
6. Contact details — name, email, phone, date of birth, and who the care is for: Me, My partner and me (couples, if you allow them — partner details collected too), or Someone else (a parent or guardian booking for a minor — the guardian's own details are collected alongside).

After Submit Request they see "Request Submitted" and get a confirmation email; they're told you'll be in touch once you've reviewed it.

Reviewing new client requests

1. Watch for the red-badged icon in the calendar header ("New client requests") — it counts requests waiting for review. You're also notified by email when one arrives.
2. Click it to open the request list. Each card shows the requester's contact details, reason, requested clinician/service/time, prescreener answers, a How they found you line when the request came in through an ad or campaign link, a violet Couples Request badge with partner info where relevant, and "Booked by" details when a guardian submitted it.
3. Click Accept — in one step this creates the client record (and for couples: the partner and their couple grouping), emails a portal invitation, and places the requested time on your calendar as a proposed session. You're then taken to the new client's chart with the intake-document picker open, so you choose which forms and consents to send — nothing is assigned automatically.
4. Or click Decline — a message to the client is prefilled for you, naming the requested time and including a link to your booking page so they can pick another. Edit it as you like (or delete the rebook line), then click Confirm Decline — the client is notified by email.

Requests from existing clients

Existing clients request appointments from their portal ("Schedule Appointment"). These don't go through the review list — the requested time appears directly on your calendar as a proposed appointment, and the client sees it as pending your approval in their portal, where they can also withdraw it. Clients are limited to a handful of open requests at a time.

Prescreening New Clients

If you want to vet fit before offering time, enable the Prescreener (Settings → Prescreener, under Clients): a short screening questionnaire prospective clients complete as part of an appointment request from the public booking page. Their answers arrive with the request, so you approve or decline with context instead of scheduling a consult blind.

Troubleshooting & FAQ

A prospective client says the page shows no providers or times. Check the chain, in order: the practice-wide Accept Requests from New Clients switch; the clinician's Accepting New Clients? switch on the Widgets page; the clinician's own Accept Online Booking Requests switch and weekly availability; and remember the earliest offered day is tomorrow.

Can someone book onto my calendar without my approval? No — new-client requests wait in the review list until you accept, and existing-client requests arrive as proposed appointments.

Someone says they submitted the new-client form, but no request arrived. If the email they used already belongs to a client of your practice, no request is created — that address gets an email asking them to sign in to the client portal and request an appointment from there.

Will the public page get spam or abuse? Submissions are protected server-side — human verification plus per-person and per-practice daily limits — so review-list junk is rare.

Can I change how the button looks? Yes — see customizing the widget.

Related

• Availability & blocked time
• Scheduling client appointments
• Client portal