Is Acuity Scheduling right for your needs?
If you would like a platform expert to walk you through the decision process before you spend time or money setting up Acuity Scheduling, then you have come to the right place!
In the video, I explore six different use cases – i.e. types of businesses – for Acuity and why each one is an ideal fit OR a poor fit for the popular scheduling software.
Scroll below the video for a full transcript.
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Video Transcript
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Introduction
This module is intended to help you save yourself the headache of getting hours or days into the process of setting up Acuity before realizing that it's not actually the right solution for you.
So, we're going to explore some ideal uses of the software, discussing why each example may be a good fit for Acuity.
And then, we're going to take a look at a few examples of what I do NOT recommend using Acuity for.
Overview: What business types and use cases work well with Acuity Scheduling?
Ok, first let's talk about cases that Acuity is generally a good fit for. The features I'll discuss are not meant to be confined to the type of business I list it with –– any of these features can be used for any type of business. For instance, you may be a personal trainer who travels to your clients' film sets, so the information about the mobile dog walking business would apply to you, too. Despite all this overlap, I wanted to situate these features in context because you're more likely to absorb the information if it's associated with a real-world example.
We'll be using 3 main examples:
A personal training business
A coaching business, and
A dog walking business.
Personal trainers and fitness instructors typically offer their clients...
- In-person group classes and one-on-one appointments.
- They may also offer packages and subscription services.
- And as their businesses scale up, they will usually add one or more other staff trainers, and some also need to manage a number of rooms in their studio buildings.
Acuity can handle all of that.
Life coaches, executive performance coaches, acting coaches, and so on tend to have predictable needs, as well.
- These entrepreneurs often work virtually, and they need it to be easy for clients to join Zoom or Google Meet sessions from any device. They also may need to collect detailed intake information from new clients.
- Coaches also frequently sell their services as packages.
- And they may have complicated availability that changes a lot based on different factors. (And actually, this could apply to any service provider, and it's probably the #1 reason people who are already successful eventually start to search for an online scheduling system–they just get too overwhelmed juggling the operations of their business AND the scheduling admin at the same time.)
The point is, Acuity is ideal to address these challenges that many coaches face.
Dog walkers have a different set of scheduling pain points because they have to travel to the clients' homes.
They need a scheduling system that collects a lot of information and instructions from the client, including the location.
Mobile service businesses like this may also need to ensure that they have enough vehicles available for staff, and that clients cannot overbook the business's transportation resources.
Acuity can do all that, too.
Ideal Use Case #1: Fitness Instructor
Let's get into a bit more detail about why Acuity Scheduling can be so great for fitness trainers.
Acuity is super useful for running the admin for studio classesthat have a combination of pre-registered students and drop-ins. ….Why?
Well first, Acuity allows you to manage limited space and resources so that you can spend less time and effort filling up all your training and class slots.
Let's call our example trainer "Alana." Alana only lets 3 personal training appointments be booked in each time slot on Thursdays and Fridays. On Monday through Wednesday, she has an extra appointment slot for her apprentice, but only if there is not a group class scheduled at the same time… you can see how this could get really complicated. Acuity is great for solving problems like this.
But Alana also needs a way to enforce her late cancellation policy because she's had a few no-shows cutting into her revenues. She could take payment up front, but that can come with problems of its own–like when you need to give refunds.
A quick note about that: Giving too many refunds can make your payment processor decide that your business is not worth the losses that come along with you. Chargebacks can also jeopardize your position. We've seen it happen–enough to know that setting yourself up for frequent refunds is not ideal.
For these reasons, Alana prefers running people's credit cards after the service is complete or on the same day in order to skip the fees and penalties that might come from Stripe, Square, or PayPal if you return funds through their systems.
So, it's to your advantage to avoid refunds. But what can you do instead to minimize your losses from no-shows? It's simple: When clients reserve in advance, you require a credit card to be entered on file in case you need to charge them a late fee. Then you just run the card at a specified time: the end of the session, the end of the day, whatever works for you.
Alana likes to charge all her clients at once at the end of each day. This admin task takes 5 minutes daily, but it keeps money moving into her bank account–without all the stress of charging clients in advance.
Here are some examples of when this feature can become really useful:
Say Alana has a client who cancels a 1-on-1 training session outside the refund window stated in her late cancellation policy. Alana's policy states that any client may cancel twice without being charged, but after that, if the client cancels just a few hours before the session, or if they don't show up at all, then they still owe her 30% of the session fee.
It's a good policy, but what's the point of rules you can't enforce? That's the beauty of a good online scheduling sytem. Acuity essentially enables Alana to have reasonable agreements with her clients about late cancellations.
Alana is training her clients to treat her and her business with respect by having boundaries she can enforce–without drama and without headaches.
Moving on…still exploring the use case of Alana the fitness trainer.
Let's talk about Membership Plans. Many entrepreneurs consider implementing subscription-based business models at some point along their way.Some entrepreneurs find that offering services with recurring automated payments provides them with greater financial security.
So, what does Acuity have to offer Alana when she decides to launch a fitness club membership?
The most obvious function businesses need to make this work is the auto-drafts. Whether Alana charge monthly for a personalized coaching program, or she provides workout videos and gym access for a small monthly fee, Acuity can probably help her achieve her vision for her subscription program and get her paid.
Another huge advantage of this system is that clients can keep track of their own progress through their packages and subscriptions via a convenient app. They can see how many classes they have left, when their membership renews, and so on. Which is great, because that means they aren't constantly asking you to do those things for them.
The next example of what's under the hood for Alana to take advantage of with Acuity is its staff and space management features.
Let's say that Alana has hired her first employee–another trainer named Jodi. Jodi needs to be able to change their availability for various services without going through Alana every time, but they also shouldn't be able to mess anything up with the scheduling system by having too much access.
Acuity has 3 different levels of access that Alana can give to her staff, including one that allows Jodi to view only their own appointment calendar and edit only their own availability. This is a game-changer for lightening your load when you begin to add staff to your fitness business.
Or, what if Alana goes the direction of opening a spa or wellness center with two massage treatment rooms? In order to keep the massage calendar full, she might need about four part-time massage therapists to cover all the times she wants to allow clients to book massages. Keep in mind, Acuity is already working on the back end to distribute the massage appointments between therapists in whatever way feels fair for her team. But if three of her therapists have marked themselves available at 2pm tomorrow, the spa could end up overbooked. So Acuity has this wonderful additional feature–Rooms & Resources–that can allow her to set up a sort of maximum number of simultaneous appointments. With Acuity, Alana would also be able to quickly re-assign appointments from one therapist to another if someone calls in sick.
Ideal Use Case #2: Life Coach
Moving on, let's explore a couple of features that are especially helpful for the subject of our life coach case study. Let's call him Carlos. Carlos is an ADHD coach.
Carlos usually works with his clients and his workshop students over Zoom. He likes using Zoom because of all the advanced features like breakout rooms, whiteboards, and cloud recording. With Acuity integrated on the back end with Zoom, each of Carlos' clients receives a custom Zoom meeting link for each coaching appointment.
Also, Carlos' no-shows have gone down by half since he started using Acuity's email and text reminders to nudge his clients. They all have typical ADHD struggles with time-blindness, so they really appreciate all the memory support that their coach's scheduling system provides.
Carlos can also sell his services as a package with a variety of different payment workflows. If one client wants to pay in several monthly installments, but another client wants to pay the entire package fee up front, Carlos can accommodate them both with Acuity.
Also, if Carlos is hired by a company to provide ongoing professional development for 5 employees, then he can use Acuity to quickly send that company an invoice that lists out 5 package codes to be distributed among the staff.
In other words, one major advantage of using Acuity is that there are so many ways to get paid.
Ideal Use Case #3: Dog Walker
So how about our dog walking business? Acuity has some great features for managing staff and delivery resources for mobile service businesses. These kinds of logistics can quickly get out of hand without a well-organized system to keep track of everything.
So let's call our example dog walking business owner Shayna.
These days, virtually everyone, including our clients, uses digital calendars to coordinate the events of their lives with family and friends, and at work. Hitting that "Add to Calendar" button from a confirmation email, website, or social media event is something many of us do multiple times a day.
So, when we harness the code magic that makes these calendar entries possible, we need the listings to tell us everything we need to know. Locations, meeting links, and special instructions all might need to be accessible via our phone's Google calendar or iCal so we don't have to hunt down the reminders in a chaotic email inbox.
If the systems that enter these events into our calendars don't have enough or the right information, what's the point? This is unfortunately too often the case with other scheduling platforms. Many only add the name and time of the event, with no other information. But if Shayna sets up her Acuity intake forms properly, her staff and clients can both easily see, right in their favorite calendar, all of the custom location information required to provide those services at people's private homes. They can also see any information that is relevant to the dog walking visit, like dog behavior issues or apartment building lock codes.
Using Acuity's custom location and intake forms, Shayna won't need to micromanage those logistics for her dog walkers, which saves her time and money. The system operates much like Shayna's personal assistant, keeping people and money moving where they need to go so that she can focus on higher-level aspects of her business.
Acuity also enables admins to manage multiple finite resources like service vehicles or special dog harnesses. When availability is set up correctly, these things won't get overbooked.
You can also use Acuity's range of settings to automatically distribute appointments among staff in specific ways, like "round robin" style, or filling one provider's calendar before starting to fill others.
Now let's look at a couple of bonus features that could be useful for Shayna––or really any kind of business.
Acuity has simple but powerful options to help you make more money providing services. For instance, if Shayna is just getting started and wants to be very flexible in order to build her client base faster, then she might decide to customize a dog walking package for a client.
Acuity places no limits on the number of packages or individual services that you offer, and you can completely control who sees what with a system that separates public from private offerings, as well as different custom categories of offerings.
This is another area where Acuity shines: giving service providers like Shayna total control over what offerings clients can and can't see, and how they are expected to pay, with lots of different options for embedding and linking. You can even create custom offers that are limited to a single client. So the visibility of Shayna's offers is completely up her.
Acuity also allows Shayna to offer nail trimming as an add-on for dog walking services. Add-ons can be set to alter the length of the appointment when selected. And the add-ons feature can even help you sell products that are associated with a service, like Shayna's homemade dog training treats, which clients can toss in their digital carts on the way through the checkout process.
Shayna can even implement a system to account for custom drive times in a number of ways. The extent of this customization is pretty limited, but it would be simple to set up something that tells the scheduler the difference between, say, distances within the same county, and distances required to drive one county over.
Overview: What business types may be the wrong fit for Acuity Scheduling?
Now let's look at some examples of use cases that may require too many workarounds to be very practical.
While this is somewhat subjective and based on your willingness to navigate complex technical solutions, my opinion about the matter is based on my experiences with hundreds of Acuity Scheduling setup clients over the course of years. These are the people who I have watched spin their wheels and struggle to make Acuity work, when they really could have saved a lot of time by seeking out specialized software that does everything they need.
Our sample use cases that I don't recommend trying are:
A Coworking space
A pet boarding facility
And a medical office.
Coworking spaces don't fit well because Acuity doesn't allow customization of appointment time length.
There's also no way to map the offerings to the physical space of the office in ways most coworking spaces will need.
Pet boarders shouldn't use Acuity because the platform does not offer multi-day appointments, and you can't apply the sort of if/then logic to forms that boarding facilities need to manage varying numbers of available slots for different kinds of dogs.
And medical offices have privacy regulations that can be tricky to manage, even with the Powerhouse level subscription for Acuity.
Acuity also lacks a built-in legally binding e-signature feature for the forms.
Impractical Use Case #1: Coworking Space
Acuity is not the best solution for coworking spaces and similar cases. The variety of open-ended offerings in a typical coworking space would be too much for Acuity.
First of all, clients can't set their own time lengths or see who is signed up for time slots.
For example, if the client needs a conference room for a 75-minute meeting, they may have to choose 60 or 120 minutes. The length of time that an offer will take is not customizable except with the add-ons feature, which isn't the most user-friendly fit for coworking.
Also, since Acuity calendars are completely private on the client-facing side, members of a coworking space can't simply contact another member on their own to discuss scheduling.
A second reason why Acuity isn't deeply functional for coworking businesses is that the bookings don't live-update and they don't have a map feature.
For instance, clients can accidentally overbook slots if the reservations are rolling in by the minute the way they tend to be for businesses of this type. If someone is halfway through the booking process, someone may jump ahead of them by accident because the reservation isn't held closed while people are completing their bookings.
Next problem: Most coworking space apps are going to want to show the floor plan of the space. This would require twisting Acuity into something almost unrecognizable.
There are other great software solutions that are perfectly suited to helping you run a busy, successful coworking space at maximum membership capacity, but I'm afraid that for the reasons I've mentioned, Acuity is not going to be ideal.
Impractical Use Case #2: Dog Boarding
Acuity is also not the best solution for dog boarding and use cases with similar needs, like bed & breakfast reservations. That's because there are too many complex conditions that would need to be managed manually.
For example, Acuity really isn't designed to manage multi-day bookings. If a client needs to board their dog for a week-long vacation, they would essentially have to book each day as a single session and fill out the intake form, over and over again, for each individual reservation. And that's just clunky, terrible user experience.
Also, in general, Acuity just can't handle all the logistical puzzles of boarding.
For example, most responsible dog boarders will set up special limits on bookings to protect the animals, like the number of puppies or the number of medically fragile dogs that they can take at once out of the total available slots. But Acuity would not support the use of these kinds of sensible limits, forcing the business to do everything by hand.
So if you're just going to be put through all that hassle and manual oversight, what's the point of setting up an online scheduler? Boarding software is going to give you and your clients a better booking and admin experience.
Impractical Use Case #3: Medical Office
And finally, medical offices probably aren't going to be well-served by using Acuity Scheduling because there are so many legal hoops to jump with the sort of privacy regulations we have in the United States. A side note to that: I have very effectively used Acuity for clients in the medical industry in countries that don't have as much red tape as we do.
First, while the Powerhouse level subscription plan does offer a Business Associate Agreement, or BAA, that contract alone will NOT cover providers for all their obligations under HIPAA.
Email and text reminders from Acuity to your clients can become a huge liability that sabotages your risk management strategy––not to mention violates your clients' trust in your ability to keep their data private.
You can sortof proof against this with consent forms, but keeping up with any non-consenting clients is going to be a challenge that may not be worth the money you save by using Acuity instead of something that's actually made for medical scheduling.
Related, Acuity doesn't have a portal for medical office clients to log in for secure messaging, form fills, and appointment reminders.
If part of the goal is to digitize the consent forms that most medical offices need to onboard all their patients, Acuity is essentially useless. That's because legally binding e-signatures aren't part of the form fill process for the patient. This would have to be added externally and strung together with Acuity via highly technical integrations with third party software.
Basically, medical offices in the US might want to steer clear from Acuity because using it would require breaking all of its best features, leaving very little that would make the office's admin processes easier.
Conclusion
This has been a deep dive to help you assess if Acuity Scheduling is a good fit for your organization's needs.
We have explored what kinds of businesses may be appropriate use cases for the software, as well as what uses are just too much trouble to try to handle using Acuity.
Join the waitlist for our upcoming course launch here!
Headache-Free Acuity Scheduling Setup >>
Thanks for tuning in!
With Love and Pixel Glitter,
Cooper & the LightPress Team