The following guide will take you through the process of setting up an appointment diary for your practioners and also how you can view your own diary on the appointments screen.
- The user setup diary screen can be found by going to your PPS Menu > Tools > Setup Appointment Diaries.
Note: Before setting up a practioners diary, you need to make sure that the new practioner has had the appointment diary box ticked on the setup system user page found within the Tools menu.
- In here you will see a list of numerous rows for each diary user that you have, along with numerous columns depicting each week for each of these diary users for the current year.
Note: When setting up a new diary user, they will be given a basic 9am – 5pm Monday to Friday for one week once they have been ticked to have a diary. This can then be modified and then continued for as long as you require.
- Once you have selected the week that you wish to create times for (or an existing week you wish to edit) then click into the correct column/row and click on the Modify button.
- You will then be greeted with the Diary User’s Appointments Availability screen. In here you have your Monday to Sunday columns. To add your times into a day, double click a column.
- You will then be prompted a Setup Diary Slot screen. In here you can select a location if you have locations setup on the system, along with a treatment rooms and descriptions for the slots, all 3 of which can be added via your PPS Menu > Tools > Look Up tables. You then need to enter in a start time, end time and appointment duration.
Note: Setting up treatment rooms is a useful option if you have one diary user using a room in the morning, and then another in the afternoon for instance. Setup your treatment rooms from the look up tables and then define which of your diary users are in each room at what times. PPS will not allow you to double book two diary users in the same place and will warn you if you try to do so and deny the action.
You can simply enter in the start time and the end time of a clinic, however this does not give any breaks on the diary for Lunch amongst other things, so it’s worth while setting up a broken down set of times, for instance - 9am to 1pm with a morning description, 1pm to 2pm with a lunch description and finally 2pm to 5pm with an afternoon description.
- Once you’ve added in your various appointment times for each day, you can then return back to the main Setup Appointment Diaries screen. You will now see the week you’ve just setup on your specific practioner row.
- You can now click on the Repeat button to mimic this week’s schedule for as many weeks or months as you require.
Note: If one of your practioners works the same times and days as another practioner, you can simply click on the Copy button from a diary user’s week and then you can highlight an empty slot on another diary user’s week and click on the Paste button.
- Once you have opened your main diary screen by clicking onto your PPS Menu > Appointments > Appointments Diary. (or clicking Ctrl-A) You can access the Diary View Style menu by clicking onto the Appointments menu at the top and selecting "Diary View" on the list.
- In this screen you can select the details of how you would like to show the information. These options are for the most part self explanatory, however the main difference you can make is the actual style and look of the appointments diary screen as shown below.
- The left hand side column shows the “Diary” style, whereas the right hand column shows the “List” style.
- You will also be given the option to show the diary based on Diary users or Treatment rooms. (For information on Treatment rooms refer to section (e) of the ‘Setting Up Your Appointments Diary’ section).
- Once you are on your diary page, you will see the boxes as shown above situated to the bottom left of your diary. The first number can be changed to anything and shows the appropriate number of columns you wish to view on your screen. The right hand side boxes change your current view. The box on the left shows all Diary users or Treatment rooms for a day. The right hand box shows a specific diary user or treatment room for one whole week.
- You will also see the above boxes if you are on a “Show All Diary Users Or Treatment Rooms For A Single Day” view. Whereby you can view specific locations that may have been setup via the look up tables’ option, and also different “Disciplines” if these have been created from the System user Setup page and associated with specific practioners.
- If you have the “Show A Diary User Or Treatment Room For One Week” setting, you will be able to select location as mentioned above, but instead of selecting a discipline, you will be able to select a specific diary user or treatment room.
Action
See: Personal Action Add
Look this up under the type of new record you want to add – e.g. Client - Add or Appointment - Add Appointment
An Appointment is an entry in the Appointments Diary for a client. When you set up your diary, you are setting up the free appointment slots. You then book Appointments into these free slots. Each Appointment can be marked with a status, represented by a colour, to show that the client has arrived for their appointment (green), is currently being seen by the practitioner (orange) or the appointment is completed (purple). You can also mark an appointment as DNA (did not attend) and select a reason why the client has not attended – these are marked in red. When booking an appointment on the diary, this is normally done by highlight a free slot then selecting to add the new appointment. When doing this, the appointment details such as date, time, duration, diary user, treatment room, etc. are already known and you do not have to enter them. Appointments Diary
The PPS Appointments Diary allows you to record your client appointments, and manage your available appointment times. There are a variety of diary view styles to suit your needs including single day, whole week, single or multiple users etc. You can access the PPS Appointments Diary from the PPS Menu: Appointments – Appointments Diary, or by pressing Ctrl-A on the Keyboard. You can also click on Appointments, or Diary on the Task Bar. The diary has a toolbar to give you access to common functions such as adding appointments, and when the diary is displayed, clicking on an item in the task bar, or selecting from the PPS menu will normally be related to the currently highlighted appointment. For example, if an appointment for Mrs Smith is highlighted, then clicking on the Accounts option on the task bar will show the accounts screen for Mrs Smith.
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A Practitioner on the PPS Appointments Diary is referred to as a “Diary User”. This is to allow the diary to be used by more people than just Practitioners in your practice. You can select to set up and use your diary either by Diary Users, or by Treatment Rooms – this can suit they way that you are used to booking your clients into the diary.
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See below for further detailed information relating to the various Appointments Diary functions in PPS. Change
See: Cash Desk; Modify Columns
See: Appointments Diary - Columns Copy
When entering text into any field, you can highlight the text and use the standard Windows™ “Copy” option to place the text on the Windows clipboard. You can then paste the text back into any similar field. See also: Appointment – Copy. Create
See: Add; Charge – Create Details
This is a generic term used to describe the information stored in any particular part of PPS. For example Main Client Details is the information you enter to this screen. In addition, there are several “notes” type fields that allow you to enter further “free text” details against a record – these are also sometimes referred to as Details. Diary
See: Appointments Diary List
List is the term used to describe information that either appears on the screen or on a report in rows and columns. The term List is also used in PPS as a list of items such as menu, or list of entries such as a look up table. See also: List style diary. Location
A Location in PPS is a physical clinic location. Older versions of PPS referred to treatment rooms as locations. Now Treatment Rooms are an additional field of information. You can set up locations to use in your PPS Appointments Diary. You can set up your diary for diary users/practitioners to be scheduled to work either in specific treatment rooms and/or locations on various days during the week. You do not have to use “Location” if you only work from one location. To set up locations, select from the PPS Menu: Tools – Look Up Tables, and select Location from the Appointments Diary Tables section. Here you can set up your various locations, and nominate a colour to each location to make each location clearly identifiable in the diary. Look Up Tables
Look up Tables are used in PPS to control the entries that are allowed in certain fields. This means that you can restrict what values are input to just those that you want recorded. For example, when adding a new appointment, the “Appointment Type” look up table can contain entries such as “Initial Assessment”, “New Patient” or “Hydrotherapy”. This helps when running reports as you can select to break down the results of your report by the look up table entry thus minimising the number of different entries (especially slight variations of spellings!).
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Some Look Up tables will store additional default values. For example the “Appointment Type” table can optionally have a Charge Codes associated with each entry. When the selected entry is used for an appointment, the charge code will be automatically selected for you when you create the charge for the appointment.
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Look Up Tables are set up and maintained using the PPS Menu: Tools – Look Up Tables.
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You can control which of your PPS users has access to setting up and maintaining Look Up Tables as part of the PPS Access Control system.
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Also see the entry under the name of each Look Up Table e.g. Occupation Modify
This is the term used throughout PPS to “change” any of your existing records. PPS has buttons on many screens with a <Modify> prompt. Clicking this button will normally take you onto a further screen that allows you to modify the selected details. For more information about modifying various types of record in PPS, see the “modify” entry under the various section of this help guide, for example Invoices – Modify, Appointments – Modify, etc. Options
PPS has a screen on the PPS Tools menu called Options. This screen can be used to set up a wide variety of system settings that affect the way that PPS works. You can make your changes to these areas and press the OK or Apply button to save your changes. The Options screen has four tabs along the top: General, Custom Client Fields, Set Up Client Contacts, and Clinical Notes. See the entries under each of these sections for more details, for example Options – General. PPS
PPS is the acronym for “Private Practice Software”. Repeat
See: Appointment – Repeat; Diary Week – Repeat; Block Appointment - Repeat Room
See: Treatment Room Select
A term used when you choose something on the screen. Some PPS screens have a <Select> button, this normally means that you pick an option, or entry in a list, then click the <Select> button. This will “select” your chosen entry and proceed to the next screen, or return to the previous screen with your chosen entry selected. Time
See: Activities – Time; Appointments – Time Tools Menu
Options on the Tools menu are listed alphabetically in this reference guide under each Section e.g. Look Up Tables. View Style
See: Appointments Diary – View Style Week
See: Appointments Diary – Setting Up
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