Scheduler helps your team offer appointments only when your organization can actually deliver them. It combines appointment types, locations, resources, staff availability, and booking rules.
• Appointment type: the service being booked, such as pregnancy test, ultrasound, counseling, or consultation.
• Location: the physical center or site where the appointment happens.
• Resource: a limited room, piece of equipment, or staff pool that can only be used by a certain number of appointments at once. Every resource is one of two kinds:
• Room or equipment (the default): a physical space or item, such as a counseling room or an ultrasound machine.
• Staff pool: shared people capacity, such as one nurse covering several services. Booking any appointment type linked to the pool uses up one of its seats.
• Position: a group of qualified staff who can cover an appointment type, such as Nurse, Counselor, or Greeter. Positions are managed in Serve and shared across CoolFocus, so the same position list you use for volunteers and staff also drives scheduling.
• Work schedule: when a specific staff member is available.
• Coverage: the bookable appointment slots CoolFocus calculates from all the settings above.
• Announcement: a dated notice for one location or all locations. Announcements are not appointments and take no time on the calendar; they appear on Home, optionally as a Scheduler banner, and on any appointment matching that location and date.
• Visit Board: the front-desk board for today's appointments and visits. Open it from the Visit Board tab inside Scheduler. Customize its stages under Settings > Scheduler Settings > Visit Board > Visit Statuses (not Care Settings). See The Visit Board and Customizing Visit Board Statuses.
Open the Scheduler settings panel and go to the Staff tab. It lists your organization's active positions and links out to Serve > Positions so you can create a position, assign qualified team members to it, or edit its details. Any position with people assigned can be linked to an appointment type to control who can cover it.
Inside Scheduler you can move between several tabs: Visit Board, Calendar, List, Staff, and Reminders. When you click the Scheduler icon in the main navigation, CoolFocus now reopens the tab you were last on instead of always starting at the Visit Board.
• This preference is remembered per user and follows you across devices, since it's saved to your account rather than to a single browser.
• If you've never used Scheduler before, or your last saved tab is no longer available, CoolFocus falls back to the Visit Board. Any preference saved from the old Search tab now opens List instead.
The List tab replaced the old Search tab. It shows appointments in a sortable, filterable list alongside the other scheduler tabs, so Visit Board, Calendar, Staff, and Reminders stay one click away instead of leaving scheduler chrome.
• If you're coming from CoolFocus 3 and looking for the old Scheduler Report, this is where that data lives now. The List tab shows the same appointments with quick search, filters, and sortable columns, so you can find and export what you need without a printed report.
• A sidebar lets you switch between All appointments and any saved appointment segments, the same way segments work on other lists in CoolFocus.
• Quick search, column filters, sort order, and column layout carry over when you switch between segments on the List tab.
• Links and bookmarks that pointed to the old Search tab now open List automatically.
On the Calendar tab, a density control in the scheduler toolbar lets you choose how tall each hour row is in the time grid, so you can see more of a typical workday without scrolling as much.
• Comfortable (default): the original spacing CoolFocus has always used.
• Compact: shorter hour rows that fit more of a typical configured workday with less vertical scrolling, useful for busy calendars or smaller screens.
Notes on how density behaves:
• It only changes row height inside the calendar time grid. It does not change browser zoom, and it does not resize app navigation, sidebars, or any other CoolFocus screen or its text.
• It applies the same way to Day, Week, and grouped Day views.
• Appointment blocks keep their correct proportional height and remain legible and easy to click, drag, or resize in either density. Short back-to-back appointments are still shown side by side rather than overlapping when rows are compact.
• Your choice is saved to your account, so it's remembered the next time you open Scheduler, on any device, and does not need to be set again per session.
• The control and the selected option are labeled for screen readers.
On the Calendar tab, CoolFocus now remembers how you last viewed your calendar so it looks the same the next time you open Scheduler.
• View: the calendar layout you were using, such as Day, Work Week, Week, or Month.
• Group by: whether the calendar was grouped, for example by staff, center, resource, or appointment type.
• My Schedule: whether the My Schedule toggle (limiting the calendar to your own appointments) was turned on.
Notes on how this works:
• This preference is saved per user and follows you across devices, the same way your last tab, calendar density, and location filter are remembered.
• A link or bookmarked URL that specifies a view, grouping, or staff filter always takes priority over your saved preference. CoolFocus only restores the parts of the calendar you did not explicitly set in the link.
• On phones and other small screens, Scheduler still opens to Day view by default even if your saved preference was a different view.
• Some groupings only make sense in Day view. If your saved grouping requires Day view and the link you followed did not specify a view, CoolFocus switches to Day view to show it correctly.
• If a link explicitly filters by a specific staff member or by unassigned appointments, your saved My Schedule preference is not applied on top of it.
On the Calendar tab, the sidebar includes a Staff filter so you can narrow the schedule to the people you care about.
• All Staff: the default. Shows appointments regardless of who is assigned.
• Unassigned Appointments: shows only appointments that do not yet have a staff member assigned, so you can spot and assign them quickly.
• Search staff to add: type at least two characters of a name into the search box to find staff-capable people and add them to the filter. Each person you add appears as a chip below the search box; click the X on a chip to remove that person from the filter.
These options are mutually exclusive: choosing Unassigned Appointments clears any specific staff you had selected, and picking specific staff clears Unassigned Appointments. The My Schedule toggle (which limits the calendar to your own appointments) takes priority over both, and turning it on clears any staff selection or Unassigned Appointments filter.
When you group the Calendar tab by staff, each column header is a person's name. Click a name to open that person's record.
CoolFocus sends you to the record where that person actually appears, based on their involvement flags:
A volunteer's name opens their record under Serve > Volunteers.
A staff member's name opens their record under Serve > Staff.
Someone marked as both a volunteer and staff opens their record under Serve > Volunteers.
If a person has neither flag set, their name is plain text rather than a link, since there is no matching record to open.
If a name that should be clickable isn't, or opens the wrong record, check that person's Volunteer and Staff involvement flags on their Contact record. See Involvement Flags: Client, Donor, Volunteer, and Staff.
The Calendar tab's sidebar also lists your active appointment types and resources so you can narrow the schedule to specific ones. When every available option in one of those lists is selected (the default), CoolFocus treats it as "show everything" rather than a strict whitelist.
That distinction matters when an appointment type or resource is later marked inactive: appointments already booked under it keep showing on Day, Week, Month, and Group views, the same way they always showed on the List tab. You only stop seeing them if you narrow the filter to specific types or resources that exclude it. Group views also add a labeled column for any inactive type or resource that still has appointments, so those appointments have somewhere to land instead of being dropped.
This is separate from Hide on Scheduler, an appointment-type setting that deliberately keeps a type off the CF5 calendar in every view, including List. See Appointment Types and Booking Rules for the difference between Active and Hide on Scheduler.
The sidebar's location filter (used on the Calendar and Staff tabs) now remembers your last choice, so you don't have to reset it every time you open Scheduler.
• If you narrow the filter to a single location, CoolFocus saves that location and applies it automatically the next time you open Scheduler, as long as you haven't already applied filters from a link or bookmarked URL.
• If you choose All Locations, that choice is saved too, so Scheduler opens showing every location again next time.
• This preference is saved per user and follows you across devices, the same way your last tab and calendar density are remembered.
• If your saved location is later removed from your organization, Scheduler falls back to showing all locations.
The Visit Board's own location picker shares this same saved preference: picking a location on the Visit Board updates it, and picking a single location in the Calendar or Staff sidebar keeps the Visit Board aligned to that same location. See The Visit Board.
If your organization has only one active location, there's nothing to choose, so CoolFocus removes the choice instead of showing it:
• The location filter on the Calendar and Staff tabs doesn't appear.
• The "By Location" option under Group By doesn't appear either.
• The Visit Board opens straight to that location without a picker.
• When you add or edit an appointment, the Location field on the booking panel shows that location's name as plain text instead of a dropdown, as long as the appointment type is only offered at that one location.
Every screen still uses that single location behind the scenes, so nothing about coverage, filtering, or the Visit Board changes other than removing a choice you'd never need to make.
If a location you had selected is later deactivated or removed, Scheduler and the Visit Board automatically fall back to your organization's remaining active locations rather than getting stuck on a location that no longer exists. If your organization ends up with no active locations at all, Scheduler shows a message that no locations are available instead of an empty or broken calendar.
Class sessions now show up on the Calendar tab alongside appointments, so staff can see class activity without leaving the schedule.
• Each block on the calendar represents one session of a class, not the class itself or its roster.
• A Show Classes toggle in the sidebar controls whether these blocks appear. It's on by default.
• Class session blocks render in teal with a diagonal-line pattern, so they read differently at a glance from appointment blocks and from call center hours.
• Class sessions aren't tied to a single resource or staff member on the calendar, so when you group the calendar by staff or resource, they never get sorted into the Unassigned column the way an unassigned appointment would.
• This is a read-only view of sessions for now. Registering clients, taking attendance, and managing the class itself still happen from the Class and Session records. See Programs and Classes.
Booking a class directly from the scheduler and opening a session's roster from its calendar block are planned as follow-up work and aren't available yet.
1. Confirm the location and its open hours.
2. Create or review the appointment type.
3. Link the appointment type to the right locations.
4. Add resources or staff requirements when capacity is limited.
5. Customize Visit Board statuses under Settings > Scheduler Settings > Visit Board > Visit Statuses if your center uses different front-desk stages.
6. Preview coverage before opening online booking.
Scheduler manages client appointment reservations. Three things it is deliberately not:
• It is not a staff calendar. Who is working comes from each person's weekly schedule and positions, shown on the Staff tab. Do not book a person's shift as an appointment.
• It is not a notice board. Messages for your team — the parking lot is being paved, the board is visiting — belong in Announcements, which then follow the client's appointment wherever staff open it.
• It is not the care record. A Care visit is separate and usually happens after the appointment is booked or checked in.
If you are moving from CoolFocus 3 and used all-day appointments for either of the first two, see The Scheduler Is Client-Centric.
• The Scheduler Is Client-Centric: What Belongs on the Calendar
• The Visit Board
• Customizing Visit Board Statuses
• Where Scheduler Settings Live
• Programs and Classes
• Involvement Flags: Client, Donor, Volunteer, and Staff
