

Ask YC: Recommend a Web Based Scheduling Software - culley

My barber is looking for a way for customers to schedule appointments.  Something simple and reliable.
I should be able to check his current availability and request an appointment.<p>He should be able to approve it (with email notification to me).<p>He currently keeps his schedule in his phone (Verizon on the built in calendar).  So access from the phone is important.<p>A reminder to me the day before my appointment would be nice.<p>This isn't hard stuff, but it seems silly that I'd have to write it.<p>Anyone have a recommendation for something that already exists?<p>I've hunted google, but mainly it looks like some salons are easy to rip off because the software sucks, but my searches haven't been exhaustive.<p>I'm hoping someone has come through here with just the thing I need or someone has seen it already.<p>thoughts?
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cstejerean
The solution is easy. Google calendar. You can share your calendar with others
(so they can see your availability, add appointments) and you can schedule
reminders, etc. As far as requesting an appointment you can create one and
invite someone else (your barber). Then you get to see if he approved your
invite.

Not all customers might be savy enough to use this, so your barber (or you)
can manually add appointments for people that schedule offline. This way
everyone can check the calendar online to get an idea about availability.

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culley
thanks for the thoughts.

Does anyone know if Google Calendar supports invites from other systems?
Outlook for instance.

Lots of lawyers with black berries as clients, but few tech savy ones.

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culley
Getting closer to an answer
[http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=...](http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=37130&topic=13759)

Looks like I can invite anyone, but still not sure if anyone can invite the
google calendar.

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culley
alright, I figured it out. Set up a gmail account for the barber. Set up a
standard email request on his site. They click the button sending him the
request. gmail is smart enough to recognize key words (like event) and tag
them. Right click to add them to his calendar. gives him "approval" rights
allows anyone to email a request for a specific time. shared calendar can
limit everyone to free / busy to keep privacy clean.

good suggestion. I'm going to give it a go.

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webwright
They are dying under SXSW load and fairly new, but <http://sched.org/> seems
like one worth keeping an eye on.

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Flemlord
Similar thread on project management software:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124253>

Top 3 were Trac, Basecamp from 37 Signals, and Fog Bugz.

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culley
Thanks for the quick summary and the link. These are too complex for the need.
I could hack one down to the right size, but I'd rather not be in the barber
support business.

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Diogenes
It might be overkill for what you need, but the open source Freeway
(<http://www.openfreway.org>) ecommerce platform does that natively. There are
also a number of bridges for Joomla! to bring specific Freeway functions over
without wrapping the whole thing into Joomla!.

