Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace company vs. Timely

I think any business can benefit from Acuity Scheduling. In my experience, however, and maybe I just haven’t found the correct settings yet, it’s been difficult to manage 4 business schedules with multiple employees and varying hours that change day-to-day and week-to-week. So I definitely would recommend it to more simple business models with set hours, as it seems like it would have all the functions one might need. I still would recommend to more complex businesses like mine as well, but also include discussion of some of the potential drawbacks.

Incentivized

Timely is well suited for organizing complex projects that require communication, transparency, data access, and monitoring tasks. It also helps with making sure everyone knows the small and day-to-day tasks required from each one, and not only the big picture of the project. In complex projects, it is easy to become frustrated by the amount of work that still needs to be done. Timely breaks it into smaller parts.

Incentivized

• Clicking on the link opens up my calendar, which has an uncluttered look, making it easy for my prospects and clients to review their options and make their choice.
• I am able to customize my schedule, the types of appointments I want to offer, and even decide how many appointments I want in a day. There are so many details that I can customize.
• I can customize how my calendar and emails look for my prospects and clients so that I come across professional and coordinated. I want the look of my business, website, etc. to have a polished, cohesive, and interesting presence.
• I love that there is a workshop/class/series option for my workshops. My attendees reserve their place and pay upfront. I can duplicate these events or add future dates. It's wonderful. This saves us a lot of time and is so convenient.
• I haven't had any trouble with my scheduler. It works flawlessly, so I don't have to take time out of my day to fix, troubleshoot or call customer service.
• I love that I can add questions for my prospects to answer right away before booking a call. This means 3 fewer steps for me. 1. They answer these questions without an email from me. 2. They make their reservation and get a follow-up email, right away. 3. I customized the follow-up email with more details and actions to take to prepare for our call.

Incentivized

• Memory app is certainly useful for Timely. It helps guide me to log time.
• Multiple platform support, so I could enter my time on my phone, and on laptops.
• Timely has app integration, the most useful app is Microsoft Office365. I can track my time according to my calendar.

Incentivized

• There are a lot of pages for similar things so sometimes its hard to find the location of where to edit things
• The ability to stop a review request email from being sent to specific clients.
• A way to block of clients scheduiling 3 times when you only have 2 openings and a way to cancel that easier.

Incentivized

• I really can't think of improvements so far
• Because, considering the size of our projects, it perfectly matches our expectations.

Incentivized

Acuity Scheduling has been very reliable. If you don't believe me, check out their status page here. They do a pretty decent job maintaining their app. To be fair, it's a pretty simple tool so they shouldn't run into too many hiccups given it doesn't feature near as many options as other applications on the market run.

Incentivized

It's just very intuitive once you get the hang of it, which won't take long. They try not to make complex things very complex and they provide explanations for everything with a greyed-out question mark icon next to the function. Also, I love that they encourage people to just get live help when they need it.

Incentivized

For admin its not great but for the team it is fairly straight forward I think. The reports are clunky at times, if I have something pulled up on a tab then go into a different tab and back into the Timely tab, whatever I had up is gone, etc.

Incentivized

Every time I had a question on how to do something or had any issues with Acuity Scheduling, mainly in the very beginning, when I was learning the platform, customer service was excellent. They were prompt to respond, friendly, and very helpful until I had the right solution.

Incentivized

Acuity's user interface was much cleaner and easier to use when scheduling meetings. We love that you can embed it within your own website and it shows the calendar right there instead of redirecting you. Acuity gave us the ability to customize our meeting types and the information collected from the person scheduling the meeting.

Incentivized

Timely does not provide recurring event tracking.

Incentivized

• Minimizing no shows
• Giving me back time by taking tasks off my mind/to-do list to focus on bigger more important things
• Payment management (it helps me make sure I receive my payments/recurring payments and follow up with clients if a payment has failed)
• Honestly just saving me from scheduling nightmares and headaches
• Timezones! It does it for you! (I work internationally)

Incentivized

• Helps us stay in budget and make more money that way
• Helps us see our actual time and can now charge new clients accordingly

Incentivized