A few important notes to below to bear in mind with pre-payments before you get started:


  • When enabling pre-payments, please note that the pre-payment will be recorded as a voucher on the patient's profile for you to redeem on the day of their appointment. Please note you will be required to create a NEW invoice on the day of their appointment. Please read on how to redeem their credit voucher here.
  • After booking the appointment, the client receives a pop up that they need to make payment
  • The client has X amount of time to pay for the appointment as specified by you. If they do not make payment within that timeframe, they will receive an email notification that it was cancelled. 
  • Booking confirmation messages will not be sent until after payment is made. 
  • The clinic will be notified of the booking made, even if it is tentative. Tentative appointments will show a different colour for that status if you have set it
  • You can choose to be notified of booking deletions by enabling the notification in Business Setup -> Notification Settings -> check the box for 'An online booking is deleted. Sent to the admin' or 'An online booking is deleted. Sent to the user linked to the service.'


Step 1: Ensure you have a payment gateway enabled


You can integrate a payment gateway from Business Setup -> Integrations. Without a payment gateway, the pre-payment will not be able to be processed.


SimpleClinic integrates with Square, Stripe and Ezi-Debit to process online payments. Information on setting these up can be found here.


Step 2: Enable pre-payment


Part A: From your Business Setup -> Your Clinic -> Diary Settings.  Set Require Payment for Online Booking to Yes -> SAVE.


Part B: At the bottom of the Diary Settings panel, set a timeout by changing the option If Payments Enabled Leave Bookings Tentative For -> Save. By default this will be set to No Timeout. We recommend 15 mins - long enough for the patient to get a credit card and come back. 


After 15 minutes, if no payment has been recorded, the tentative appointment will be deleted and they will receive an email notifying them of this (if you complete step 4 below). 

HOWEVER, practitioner or reception users can stop the unpaid tentative appointment from being deleted by contacting the client, arranging for alternative payment arrangements, and changing the appointment status to "Confirmed". 



Part C: To prevent doubling-up of payments in the reports, go to Business Setup -> Your Clinic -> Report Settings -> change the Hide Vouchers in Sales Reports setting to "Yes" -> SAVE


Some clinics do not want the details of the vouchers to be displayed on the Dashboard trading figures also, and if so, you can turn off the displaying of voucher amounts by going to Business Setup -> Your Clinic -> Dashboard settings -> Exclude vouchers from dashboard -> YES -> SAVE.



Step 3: Choose a colour for your tentative appointments.


You can colour code your tentative appointments in the diary by using the Calendar Status Colours option at the bottom of the Diary Settings panel.  Pick your preferred colour for tentative appointments and this colour will be used for the colour coding in the practitioner diary.





Be aware that if you have allocated colours directly to services from the Services -> View Service colour picker the colours defined for the service WILL OVERRIDE the status colour, preventing you from easily seeing which appointments are still tentative.


If you hover over a tentative appointment in the diary the status will also be indicated as tentative in the pop over.  Once paid this will no longer show as tentative.




Step 4:  Customise the email sent to the patient when a tentative appointment is deleted.


The patient will receive any email and SMS booking confirmations you have defined for the event as these are automatically triggered on event creation.  Be sure to set an email to be used when / if the appointment is deleted.  


Scroll down to the Message Settings panel. This can be customised for each service category.





NB - Please be aware that if you do not define a matching Tentative Removed Email for the Service Category of the appointment, the patient (who booked in but not paid) will receive no notification that their appointment has been cancelled!  Make sure you set these for each of the service categories you offer.


The practitioner who was assigned the tentative appointment will be sent an email when the tentative booking times out and is deleted, for them to follow up with the patient to reschedule.


Sample Wording:


Dear {{client.first_name}}   


This is just a quick note that your appointment has been cancelled as we did not receive payment to secure your appointment.


To re-book, please jump back on to the online booking:


Kind Regards,

YOUR NAME


Step 5: You can set a percentage for how much of the consultation fee you would like to take as pre-payment. You can do this by going to:


Services -> Click the blue view button on the service you would like to edit -> In Prepayment Percentage, you can set the percentage of the consultation fee to take as prepayment. Once set, you can click SAVE from the top right hand corner.


Please be aware if you are integrated with Xero, prepayment needs to be 100%, otherwise you will need to adjust invoices in Xero for every prepayment.