Help centre Calendar and appointments
Calendar and appointments
Book jobs straight from a conversation, send confirmations and reminders, and see your day in your own calendar app.
How do I book an appointment from a conversation?
Open the conversation and look at the contact panel beside it. The Appointments section has a Book button, which opens the booking form with the customer already attached. Give the job a title, pick a start time and how long it runs, choose who it is assigned to, and add the job address and any notes.
The appointment links back to the conversation, so the thread and the booking stay together. A few things worth knowing: only contacts with a phone number can be attached (that is how the confirmation text reaches them), your team does the booking rather than the customer, and the AI never books on its own. The calendar is included on the Business and Pro plans, see pricing.
How do confirmation and reminder texts work?
When you book an appointment, HiveThread can text the customer a confirmation straight away and a reminder before the visit. Both are switched on by default, and the reminder goes out 24 hours ahead until you change the lead time in Settings, then Calendar.
You write both messages in your own words on the same page, using {{time}}, {{staff}} and {{org}} wherever you want HiveThread to fill in the details. Confirmations go out immediately, while reminders are shifted out of your quiet hours. If the customer has opted out of texts, or you have not connected a text channel yet, the booking still saves and the message simply does not send. These texts come out of your monthly text allowance like any other message.
How do I see my HiveThread appointments in Google, Apple or Outlook?
Go to Settings, then Calendar, and find the Calendar feed panel. Choose Create feed URL, copy the link, and add it in your own calendar app as a subscribed calendar (Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook all support this).
The feed is read only and private to you: it shows the appointments assigned to you, and nothing you do in the other calendar comes back into HiveThread. Your calendar app decides how often it refreshes, usually about once an hour, so a new or cancelled appointment can take a little while to show up. Treat the link like a password: if it gets out, use Regenerate feed URL and subscribe again with the new one. That settings page is open to owners and admins at the moment, so if you are a team member and want your own feed, email [email protected].
What are job types and staff availability?
Job types are your service list, for example a quote visit or an annual service. They live in Settings, then Calendar, and they prefill the booking form with a title and a sensible duration so bookings stay consistent.
Per-staff appointment availability is a separate switch on the same page, and it is off unless you turn it on. Off, HiveThread treats your calendar as one shared diary. On, you set who can take each job type and their own working hours, so two people can be booked at the same time and the AI works out free times from the staff who can actually do that job. Owners and admins can change both.
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