Your Google or Outlook Calendar, Synced Both Ways

Your client appointments are in AssisTime, but your personal life is in Google Calendar or Outlook: the dentist, the school meeting, Friday dinner. The result: you check two calendars before accepting an appointment, and sometimes a client books online right when you're at the garage.

AssisTime's synchronization with Google Calendar and Outlook 365 has been completely reworked to solve this problem. It now works both ways, follows changes and deletions, protects your private appointments and can even create the video conference link for your remote appointments.

What the synchronization does

• From AssisTime to your external calendar: the appointments you enter, and those your clients book online, show up in Google Calendar or Outlook, on your phone and your computer;
• From your external calendar to AssisTime: your personal events are imported into your AssisTime calendar, in grey. They block the time slot: clients can no longer book over them on your online booking portal;
• Changes follow: move an appointment on one side, and it moves on the other;
• So do deletions: an appointment deleted in AssisTime disappears from your external calendar, and an event cancelled in Google or Outlook disappears from AssisTime.

Syncing happens on its own when you open your calendar or your home page, and when a client books online. There's nothing for you to trigger.

How to turn it on

Under Calendar > Settings > Calendars, open your calendar. For the question Do you want to synchronize this calendar with an external calendar?, choose Google Calendar or Outlook 365, save, then follow the steps to connect your account and choose the calendar to sync. Each calendar syncs with one service at a time.

If you use Google Calendar, make sure your Google calendar's time zone matches the one selected in AssisTime: otherwise, appointments created directly in Google could arrive at the wrong time. AssisTime warns you if the two don't match.

Your private appointments stay private

Do you work as part of a team, in a clinic or a spa? Your colleagues don't need to see the name of your doctor or your personal appointment. On the same page, check Make appointments imported from an external calendar confidential (visible only to you).

Your colleagues then see a simple "Busy (private)" block at the time of the event: they know you're not available, without seeing the details, and they can't open, move or delete it. You still see everything.

Another option, just below, solves a common annoyance: all-day notes (a reminder, a birthday, a vacation spread over several days) that used to block your availability for the whole day. Check it, and those grey events stay visible in your calendar without preventing clients from booking.

A Google Meet or Microsoft Teams link, added automatically

Do you offer remote sessions? No more creating a meeting and copying the link by hand for every client. Once synchronization is on:

1. under Calendar > Settings > Appointment locations, open (or create) your virtual location and check This location is virtual (video conference);
2. in your calendar's settings, choose the service to use on the Video conference line: Google Meet if your calendar is synced with Google, Microsoft Teams if it's synced with Outlook. The Test this service button creates a test meeting and deletes it right away, so you know everything works;
3. that's it. Every appointment booked at that location, by you or by your client online, gets its own meeting link, inserted in the appointment's location. The link appears in your calendar and in the emails sent to the client.

If the appointment is moved, the meeting follows, since it's part of your calendar event. Microsoft Teams requires a Microsoft 365 work or school account. Prefer your own virtual room? Choose Permanent meeting link (that I provide) instead and paste your link once and for all.

Who is it for?

For anyone juggling two calendars: the self-employed professional who manages their personal life in Google or Outlook, the team already working with Microsoft 365, or the therapist who offers both in-person and remote sessions. Already using Google sync, as described in our 2019 article How to sync the AssisTime calendar with Google Calendar? The improvements apply automatically.

Discover everything AssisTime's online calendar and online booking portal can do. Not a client yet? Try AssisTime for free.