The CoolFocus Scheduler holds client appointments: a person is expected to come in, for a service, at a location, at a time. That is the whole calendar.
Everything else your team used to write on the calendar now has a purpose-built home.
What you need the team to know | Where it lives now |
|---|---|
Who is working today | Each person's weekly schedule, viewed on the Scheduler Staff tab |
The nurse is only here Tuesdays and Thursdays | That person's weekly schedule |
Ultrasound is only offered Thursday mornings | The appointment type's bookable hours |
We are closed Thanksgiving | A date exception on the location's schedule |
Staff meeting 12–1, do not book over it | An Availability Block |
The parking lot is being paved — send clients to the side door | An Announcement |
Board visit in the office today | An Announcement |
In CoolFocus 3, the calendar accepted anything you typed on it. Centers used that freedom well: all-day entries became the sticky note for who was working, which room was down, and what the front desk needed to remember. It worked, and it took real ingenuity.
It works right up until something other than a person has to read the calendar.
• Online booking has to answer "what times are open?" before a client will trust it.
• Scheduling partners — HopeSync/Clara, Infinite Worth, Olive, PlusLink — ask that same question through our API, at 11 p.m., with no one at the front desk to interpret.
• Reminders and texting have to know which client owns which appointment and which phone number.
An all-day row reading "Ashley + Maria, no ultrasound today" means everything to your front desk and nothing to any of those. To answer "what is available?" honestly, availability had to become real settings instead of text typed onto a calendar.
The trade: the scheduler is more opinionated than it used to be. In exchange, it can answer for you — to a client booking at midnight, to a partner call center, and to your own reminder system — without a staff member translating.
Keeping these separate is what makes the calendar readable at a glance.
1. Client appointments. Someone is coming in. This is the only thing on the calendar, so a full calendar always means a full day of clients.
2. Announcements. Notices your team should see in context. They are not appointments and they take no time on the calendar.
3. Availability. Location hours, appointment-type hours, holidays and date exceptions, Availability Blocks, positions, and each person's weekly schedule. This is what decides whether a time can be booked.
CoolFocus 5 appointments do not have a freeform subject line to type into. In CoolFocus 3, staff often typed a client's name, the appointment type, or a note into that field, information that already lives on the appointment or the client record. Removing the free-text field keeps that information from ending up somewhere a shared screen, printed schedule, or synced calendar could expose it, and it will not come back as a card option.
To control what actually shows on an appointment's calendar card, use Scheduler card display on the appointment type instead:
Open Settings → Scheduler → Appointment Types and select the appointment type.
On the Overview section, find Scheduler card display.
Turn client name, appointment type, and time on or off, and choose up to five additional fields to show. Empty values hide automatically.
This is set per appointment type, so different services can show different details on their cards. See Appointment Types and Booking Rules for the full list of card options, and Hide Client Names from Scheduler if you need to hide who is booked on a shared or waiting-area screen.
An announcement is a dated notice for one location or all locations:
• Parking lot is being paved — have clients enter through the side door
• Board visit in the office today
• Lobby closed for carpet replacement; check in at the back desk
What makes announcements different from an all-day calendar entry is where they show up. An announcement is not stuck on the scheduler screen. It attaches to the day and location, so it appears on an appointment wherever staff open that appointment:
• On the Home dashboard, for everyone.
• As a banner on the Scheduler, when Show on scheduler is checked.
• On the appointment itself — matched to that appointment's location and date.
That third one is the reason this exists. An advocate texting a client in the Inbox can open the client's upcoming appointment right there in the conversation and see "enter through the side door" without leaving the thread or opening the calendar. The staff member who needs the notice is rarely the one looking at the scheduler.
Full setup steps: Announcements.
Most all-day appointments were solving one real problem: "I need to see who is here today." That is a legitimate need, and it is exactly why staffing was pulled out into its own feature rather than left as text on the calendar.
Staff and volunteer scheduling runs on positions plus each person's own weekly schedule:
• A position describes a qualification — Nurse, Sonographer, Advocate, Counselor. Positions cover staff and volunteers together.
• Each person has their own weekly schedule, with hours per location and date-specific exceptions for time off. Open the person's record under Serve → Staff or Serve → Volunteers and use the Availability tab.
• An appointment type can require a position, so a pregnancy test only offers times when a nurse is actually working.
To see who is working, use the Staff tab in Scheduler. It shows the day grouped by team member or by position, and you can pin the people you always want to see. Details: Staff Positions and Work Schedules.
The payoff for entering a schedule once, instead of retyping names on the calendar every day: the same schedule that tells your team who is here also decides what a client can book, and stops a client booking an ultrasound on a day with no sonographer.
We are continuing to improve how staffing is displayed, including clearer at-a-glance views of who is on site for a given day. That work belongs on the Staff tab. If your center depends on a view we do not have yet, tell support — those requests are shaping what we build next.
Existing all-day entries still appear at the top of the calendar, above the time grid. CoolFocus 5's Add Appointment panel does not offer an all-day option, so no new ones are created by your team.
To clean up:
1. Decide what each one was really saying, using the table at the top of this article.
2. Recreate it in the right place — a schedule, a block, or an announcement.
3. Delete the old all-day entry.
You do not have to do this all at once. Convert them as you come across them.
If the all-day row is only in your way visually, you can collapse the all-day row on the calendar; the setting is remembered for your account.
An appointment stores the clock time it was saved with. Correcting a location's time zone changes what CoolFocus calculates from then on — bookable slots, reminders, calendar feeds, and online booking — but it does not restate appointments that are already on the calendar. Those keep showing their original time until someone reschedules them.
This is true of every appointment, not only all-day ones. It is simply most visible on all-day rows, because the time on those was never meaningful in the first place. If you have corrected a time zone and old entries now read oddly, reschedule the ones that still matter and replace the all-day rows using the table at the top of this article.
• Announcements
• Availability, Closures, and Scheduler Blocks
• Staff Positions and Work Schedules
• Scheduler Overview
• Appointments
