An appointment type describes the service being scheduled, such as Pregnancy Test, Ultrasound, Counseling, or Class Intake.
Open Scheduler > Scheduler Settings > Types, or go to Settings > Schedule > Appointment Types.
Selecting an appointment type opens its settings page with five sections:
For each appointment type, review:
Name: the internal service name.
Public name: the label clients see; when blank, CoolFocus uses the regular name.
Description and color.
Active: inactive types are hidden from booking and normal calendar use.
Hide on Scheduler: hides the type from the CF5 scheduler calendar and appointment-type pickers even while it stays Active. This is meant for legacy CoolFocus 3 appointment types that a center still needs active for the old system, but does not want cluttering the new scheduler. When checked, the type is excluded from the scheduler's Types filter, from appointment-type pickers, and appointments already booked under that type no longer render on the CF5 calendar when no type filter is applied.
Category and sort order: organize staff and online booking lists.
Use the Scheduling section to control where and when this appointment type can be offered, and who or what must be available.
Assign every location where the appointment type is offered. A type must be assigned to at least one active location. Without a location assignment, clients cannot book it.
Choose Location Hours when the service follows the site's normal hours.
Choose or create a custom schedule when the service is offered during a smaller window.
Select the staffing model: No Staff, Position Pool, or Specific Staff.
Use Positions when a qualified person must be working. Mark a position required only when the appointment cannot happen without it.
Use Resources when appointment types share a room, equipment item, or capacity limit. A position answers who is qualified, a shared resource prevents overlapping use across linked appointment types.
Open the Rules section and define how appointment times are generated.
Duration: how long the appointment lasts.
Start time increment: how often a new appointment may begin. When blank, it follows the duration.
Booking lead time: the minimum notice required.
Booking window: how far into the future clients can book.
Display duration: the length shown to clients, which may differ from internal reserved time.
Buffer before and after: protected time around the appointment.
Maximum per day or week: limits bookings for this type.
The Booking section controls client-facing publishing, intake forms, and consent documents.
Review:
Enable Online Booking
Public label and description
Booking and preparation instructions
Translations
Private booking link
Public URL slug
API visibility (Show on API)
A private link allows invited clients to book without showing the type in the public list. Treat regenerated links as replacements for previously shared links.
Under Booking Questions, attach short forms clients answer during online booking. Use Create new booking question form to start a brand-new form without leaving this page. This opens the same form creator used in Care module settings, pre-configured for a booking question form, so you can build and assign a form in one step instead of navigating to Scheduler > Settings > Forms first.
Under Consent Documents, link the client consent forms that should be sent automatically for appointments of this type. For each linked document you can mark it Required and set a renewal rule (once, each visit, yearly, or every N days).
Every consent document has a target audience: Client or Volunteer. This keeps the two sets of documents separate:
The picker only lists active, client-facing consent documents. Inactive (archived) documents and documents created for volunteers do not appear.
Volunteer consent documents are managed separately, under the volunteer consents list, and only appear when assigning consents for volunteer records.
A client's intake before an appointment (see Viewing submitted intake forms from an appointment) only includes active, client-audience consent documents. Retiring a consent document (marking it inactive) removes it from future client intakes without deleting past submissions.
The Charts section links the standard visit charts that should appear in the visit workspace for this appointment type.
Built-in chart templates (Ultrasound, Pregnancy Test, and other templates that render from the visit record itself) just need to be linked here to appear on the visit, no separate chart entry is created for them.
Custom chart templates require the Premium plan. When a custom template is linked and your organization has that entitlement, starting a visit for this appointment type automatically creates a draft chart entry for each linked custom template, ready to fill in on the visit's Charts tab.
Required and chart order set here are honored by auto-creation: required links are still just a flag for staff to notice, and the order controls the sequence charts appear in.
If your organization does not have the Premium custom-templates entitlement, custom template links are saved but stay inert. No chart entry is auto-created until you upgrade.
Auto-creation happens once per visit and template. Reopening or restarting a visit will not create duplicate chart entries for the same template.
Chart auto-creation runs in the background when the visit starts. If it fails for any reason, the visit itself still starts normally so front-desk staff are never blocked by a charting issue.
See Custom Chart Templates and Managing Chart Templates for more on building and configuring the templates themselves.
When you add a custom question to a form, choose an Answer Type to control how the client responds:
Short Text, Long Text, Email, Phone, Date, Number: standard single-value inputs. Email, Phone, Date, and Number show the matching keyboard and format on mobile devices.
Dropdown: the client picks one option from a list you define.
Yes / No: a ready-made dropdown preset that automatically fills in Yes and No as the two options, so you don't have to type them yourself. Under the hood this is a Dropdown question, just pre-filled.
Checkbox: a single on/off toggle (for example, "I agree"), separate from Yes / No. Checkbox is its own true/false field, not a two-option choice.
Multi-select: the client can check as many options as apply from a list you define. Multi-select questions render as a group of checkboxes, one per option, not a text box, and the client's answer is validated against the options you configured.
When editing an existing question, CoolFocus recognizes a Dropdown question whose two options are exactly "Yes" and "No" and shows it selected as the Yes / No preset, so switching between Dropdown and Yes / No doesn't create duplicate or conflicting answer types.
When you add a custom question to a booking or intake form, you choose an answer type. The available types are:
Short Text, Long Text, Email, Phone, Date, and Number: standard single-value inputs.
Dropdown: the client picks one value from a list of options you define.
Yes / No: a ready-made dropdown preset that is automatically seeded with a Yes and No option, for questions with a simple yes/no answer.
Checkbox: a single on/off toggle, separate from Yes / No. Checkbox was previously labeled "Yes / No" even though it only ever behaved as a single checkbox; it has been relabeled to avoid confusion with the new Yes / No dropdown preset.
Multi-select: the client can choose more than one option from a list you define. On the client-facing form, a multi-select question renders as a group of checkboxes, one per option, not a single text field.
If you edit an older question that was already saved as a plain Yes/No-style dropdown, CoolFocus recognizes it as the Yes / No preset automatically as long as its two options are named Yes and No.
Good to know: a rendering issue previously caused Dropdown and Multi-select questions to display incorrectly to clients filling out a form (for example, from a scanned QR code or a direct form link), Dropdown could appear as a single checkbox, Multi-select as a single text line, and some questions could be missing entirely from the rendered form. This has been fixed: every configured question now renders with its correct answer type and every question appears on the client-facing form.
When you build a form used as booking questions, each question can map to a client field. One of the available mappable fields is Contact Preference (Text / Call / Both), which maps to the client's preferred contact method.
If a booking question is mapped to Contact Preference:
The online booking form shows that question with Text, Call, and Call/Text options instead of the standard built-in Contact Preference field, so clients are not asked for their contact preference twice.
The client's answer is saved as their preferred contact method, the same record used elsewhere in CoolFocus.
If no booking question is mapped to Contact Preference, the standard built-in Contact Preference field continues to appear on the booking form as before.
Test at least one booking for every active online appointment type and location. Confirm the displayed duration, instructions, questions, confirmation, and resulting appointment match what staff expect. If the type uses a Contact Preference booking question, confirm it appears only once and that the client's answer is reflected on their record. If the type has linked custom chart templates, start a test visit and confirm the expected draft charts appear on the Charts tab. If the form includes Multi-select or Yes / No questions, confirm they render as checkboxes or a Yes/No choice and that submitted answers show up correctly on the client's intake.
