How to Easily Schedule Your Team in WordPress

Simply Schedule Appointments and Formidable Forms are a WordPress match made in heaven! Learn how to schedule your team using these great plugins.

As anyone running an online business will tell you, allowing your customers a direct line to schedule time with you and your team is key to growing your business and retaining existing clients. And yet, businesses using WordPress are still in search of a solution that allows them to easily schedule and manage the availability of their teams and themselves. That is, until now. With Simply Schedule Appointments Plus and a premium edition of Formidable Forms, we’ve put together a simple way to create and offer team scheduling for your business—and it can be set up in just minutes. In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to create a team scheduling system for your business in WordPress. This isn’t the first time we’ve worked with Simply Schedule Appointments either. We teamed up with them to show you how to create appointment booking forms in WordPress. Now let’s get started with another handy guide! Quick note: Are you a high-performing team looking for advanced team scheduling and management vs. creating a simple team scheduling form? If so, you may be a better fit for Simply Schedule Appointment’s Business Edition.

How to set up team scheduling in WordPress

Before we get started, make sure you have Simply Schedule Appointments Plus Edition and a premium Formidable Forms edition installed and activated on your site. This should enable both new Appointments tab and Formidable tab in your WordPress Dashboard. Now, ready to set up scheduling for your team? Let’s jump in!

1. Create a new Appointment Type for your team member in Simply Schedule Appointments

An Appointment Type will represent your teammate's booking calendar. This is what sets the employee’s availability. Note: If this is your first time opening up the Appointments tab in WordPress, you’ll be greeted by the Setup Wizard, but you can always skip it to continue with this tutorial. In this walkthrough, we’ll set up appointment types for a three-person team, each responsible for particular inquiries:

• Nathan – Sales
• Mike – Marketing
• Natalie – Customer Support

To begin, go to Appointments → Appointment Types in your WordPress dashboard and click Create a New Appointment Type:

Basics Tab

At the top, enter basic details like the team member’s name and appointment duration:

Availability Tab

Then, use the options below to set up the availability for the team members booking calendar. First, use the Availability section to control the times when you’re available for this appointment each day. People will be able to choose from these times when submitting a form with Formidable Forms. Next, use the Scheduling Options section to control restrictions like how many of this appointment type can be booked per day, how much notice is required before an appointment, etc. Formidable Forms will automatically apply these restrictions in your forms. Check out any other settings that are relevant to your needs. And, check out our Help Center for more details on the other settings. Then, click the Save button to finish creating your appointment type.

2. Create additional appointment types for the remaining team members

This step is easy—just replicate Step #1 for your remaining team members. Use the little black cog to the far-right of the listed Appointment Type to clone the first one. Here’s how it should look like in the Appointment Types tab: Note: During this process, just make sure to review and set the correct availability and advanced scheduling options for each team member—in case they differ from other team members.

3. Enable Simply Schedule Appointment’s Independent Availability

Independent Availability is a Simply Schedule Appointments feature that allows each appointment type to have its own unique availability. With Independent Availability, team members—like Nathan, Mike, and Natalie—can all take appointments at the same time based on their own availability (instead of all three adhering to a single availability calendar). By default, Independent Availability is turned off. For team scheduling, we’ll want to make sure to turn it on. To do so, go to Settings in your Simply Schedule Appointments dashboard and then scroll to the bottom until you see Developer Settings and click on it. Once in Developer Settings, simply turn on Give appointment types separate availability. And that’s it in Simply Schedule Appointments! We’ve set up our team members with their own appointment types and availability, and now we’re ready to create our team scheduling form.

3. Create a new form in Formidable Forms

To begin creating your team scheduling form, go to Formidable → Forms in your WordPress dashboard and click Add New at the top of the page. You’ll then be prompted to choose a template (we suggest Blank Form) as well as name your form (we’ve named ours “Contact Our Team”. Once you’ve chosen your template and named your form, click create and you’ll be able to begin editing your form:

4. Add the Radio Button field to designate your team’s departments

Next, we’ll add a few fields to collect information. In our example, we’ve simply added a Name field and Email field. Note: The Name and Email fields are necessary for SSA to list out new appointments properly. Then, we added the Radio Button field below and configured the field label to ask who the booking party would like to get in touch with, as well as three radio button options that designate our teams as options. Note: Make sure to check the required box on each field that you deem necessary. In this exercise, we’re requiring all included fields to be filled out/selected.

5. Add the Appointment field to the form for each team member

Now, we’ll add the Appointment field to our form below the radio buttons. Since we have three team members' schedules here, we’ll need to add the Appointments field three times. Simply drag-n-drop it in below the radio buttons.

6. Configure conditional logic in each Appointment to correctly display team members

Now that our Appointment field is in place, we’ll do two things. First, configure each field’s Appointment Type setting to match each team member’s schedule from SSA. Then, add conditional logic to only display this appointment type if the radio button selection matches that team member’s department. Here, you can see we’ve designated this appointment type as Nathan – Sales, and configured the conditional logic to Radio Buttons equals Sales. Then, we simply replicate the process for all team members: And now our team scheduling form—complete with all three team members—is set up and ready to be displayed on our website!

7. Displaying your team scheduling form on your website

Finally, we’ll want to add our team scheduling form to our website. To do this, we’ll simply create a new page in the WordPress admin dashboard, drop in the Formidable Forms block, and select our newly created form from the drop-down menu: Once our page is published, you can see the form in action (in this case, I’ve selected Sales which correctly loads and displays the booking form for Nathan – Sales. And voila! Our team is now ready to be scheduled by website visitors, customers, or clients as needed!

An even more powerful team scheduling feature is on the way!

Looking for a more advanced way to manage and schedule your team? The team at Simply Schedule Appointments is currently working on releasing an out-of-the-box team scheduling feature with even more advanced team scheduling capabilities, like:

• Automatically assigning new bookings to team members
• Independent Google Sync for each employee
• Independent blackout dates (such as holiday and vacation days) for each employee
• And more!

Bonus: Interested in testing the beta version of Simply Schedule Appointment’s team scheduling feature? Simply purchase the Business Edition and receive first access!

Read more about WordPress scheduling forms

• The Complete Guide to Building Web Apps in WordPress (30+ Examples)
  Read More

  How to Build a Custom Booking System in WordPress
  Read More

  How To Create a WordPress Form With a Datepicker [3 Steps!]
  Read More
• 9 Best WordPress Events Plugins [Compared Side-by-Side!]
  Read More

  9 Best WordPress Appointment Booking Plugins
  Read More

  How To Create An Appointment Booking Form in WordPress
  Read More

---

Formidable Forms has many deep integrations with several of the top WordPress plugins - not just Simply Schedule Appointments! Don’t hesitate to give Formidable a try 100% risk-free for 14 day. Check out our premium plans on our pricing page.