Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, review Microsoft Bookings, which works seamlessly with the Microsoft 365 calendar to help your customers quickly find available times and avoid double-booking. Watch the video, listen to the audio, or read the transcript.
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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS: Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA, Randy Johnston.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Randy, welcome to the accounting Technology Lab sponsored by CPA practice advisor. With your hosts, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley,
Randy Johnston 00:11
good day. Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host, Brian Tankersley, now I got to tell you, setting up meetings, what a pain, but I’m glad that I have automation to help with it. You know, for those of us that don’t have a full time admin, and even those of us that do, having an automated tool can make all the difference in the world. Now, there’s lots of competitors out there, and we’ve done other accounting Technology Labs talking about tools like Calendly or iCal or confirmed, but today we want to talk about Microsoft bookings. Now I know, Brian, you have set up bookings and used it in the past as have I. And what would you like our listeners to know about Microsoft bookings?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:56
Well, first off, I agree with you that it doesn’t really matter which bookings tool you use, as long as it’s compatible with the email product you use, compatible with the Calendar tool you use, and you can figure out how to make it do what you want to. Okay. So, so this is just a tool that basically will present to people a menu of the available meeting options. You basically what happens is you define the types of meetings you want to have, whether they’re virtual or online, in person, and you know you then you can even identify, in some things resources, where it has to make sure the conference room available, and then it will book the conference room, or you have to make sure you have teams available, and then it will book teams, but it will actually look at somebody’s free, busy and then, based on the constraints that you put in there, it will allow somebody to pick the time they’d like to meet with you.
Okay, so you know if, if we were doing this, you can see we have the 30 minute, one hour meeting, and the quick question in the in the item that I’m showing you right now, and you can see that we have different appointments in here, but there’s a lot more flexibility than you see with this. So I can say, all right, I want this to be on my public meeting page that everybody can see to pick things in here, but then I have multiple meeting types that are not in this booking page. So I have a four hour meeting type and a two hour meeting type that I send one off links to people on okay, because the last thing I want is somebody to tie me up.
And I have other rules, like, I have it set up where you have to book at least 24 hours in advance, so that once I plan my day, I don’t have to go back and fix it. You know, I don’t lose three hours in the middle of the day to two people booking things in at the last minute, on top of stuff, when I’ve already allocated that time to something else. So it’s a helpful tool. Here. It’s in most plans. It’s in the business, premium business, standard office, 365 just about every office. 365 enterprise plan and education plan, just about every Microsoft. 365 enterprise education plan. There’s also a companion bookings app for Android and iOS. Shout out to my friend Steven Phelan.
That’s a that’s a CPA practitioner in Mustang, Oklahoma. Steven actually started using this at his little, his little firm, years ago, and it didn’t matter, you know, the beautiful part about it, it didn’t matter who was booking appointments for him, they had a they had the same page to book those appointments. As opposed to having to go in and and look at the calendar and figure out and then go through all the stuff, it just makes it much simpler to to fill all these things out. So what bookings does is it uses predefined meeting types. It puts limits around when the meetings are booked.
So you know, it looks for if you have to have constraints, or if they’re physical things you need, like a conference room, or, again, available virtual meeting space or something like that. Is it private, one time use or public? So for example, if you, let’s say you worked for one of the big one, of the big, big four that, just as we’re recording this, laid off a bunch of people in the last week. You could actually go through and set up a meeting type what called launching pad, and you could go in and then meet with those people. They could pick the meeting, and then this would be their introduction to here’s what you have available to you in Cobra. Here’s the severance we’re offering. Here’s the here’s all the stuff. And then you wouldn’t list that as a public meeting. So the idea behind this, again, is that they can look at your calendar and pick the time in here.
Again, what we’re trying to get away from is the pre meeting to set up the time when we’re going to actually meet, you know, which is just, it’s just, it’s so, such a meta waste of time. So it will go through again and look at the hours that are available for certain appointment types. So there may be things that you don’t want to do first thing in the morning. On the other hand, you know, like, like with Randy and I, if we really want to, need to do serious thinking and things like that, he and I both tend to do better early in the morning. Okay? And. You get to four or five o’clock in the afternoon, all I want there is people pitching me. Okay? So I want somebody pitching me where I don’t have to think super hard, I just have to absorb and react to it.
So I don’t have to be, you know, because I got to tell you, I lose at least 20 IQ points over the day, you know. And it’s just, it’s, it’s one of those things where, you know, I don’t know that I can afford to lose that many on something important. Okay, so we just have to be careful with that. But we can set a point hours for it. So like, you know, the when people are trying to pitch us on stuff, I can set that up as an appointment type that has to happen between three and 5pm Okay, and that’s, that’s the available time. And if you don’t like it, you can pick three to five tomorrow or three to five the next day. Similarly, we we can set up how far in advance things need to be in some of the tools, like in Calendly, I can set up certain documents that they need to send. And I can even make people make a payment to me before I before I agree to meet with them and and so again, we can have these pages that can go in there. Now, the way it works is you set up the times when it’s available, and the constraints around it and all that in a page.
It takes a little while to do it. It’s not very long. And then you can put these things on a personal meeting page. So this is what my personal meeting page looks like. You have a 15 minute quick question, you have a 30 minute meeting on teams, and you have an hour meeting on teams, and so it will handle this. Now, one thing about the Microsoft tool is it does not work well with it does not work with Zoom and it does not automatically set it so it doesn’t work with Zoom to automatically set up the meetings of zoom, and it doesn’t work with G Suite or Google Calendar, okay, Calendly does. It’s, you know, it’s about $130 a year. I think that’s what I pay for it, for the plan I’ve got. But then this, but bookings, is actually included in your Microsoft 365 subscription. So if you’re not using one of these tools, this is one of the biggest no brainers in the history of Earth to set things up.
I think about hairdressers and massage therapists and accountants and attorneys and all kinds of folks like that. This lets people have some visibility into your calendar to see when you’re available for that kind of appointment, but it doesn’t let them see what you’re doing, and it doesn’t mean you have to share the whole calendar with them. They can just see whether it’s a yes or no on those dates and times again the visitor enters their contact information into there with their email address. If it’s if you’re trying to get a virtual meeting, it will actually, then you can actually set up where it will send a confirmation email. You can even set it up if you have a if you have the teams, the enhanced teams thing, the teams type two subscription.
It will actually send text messages to you and the person that books the appointment, confirming according to the schedule you set, letting know that that’s happening again. They’ll receive they’ll receive the confirmation in there, and then they’ll get a link to the web page. So if they have to reschedule, and they figure out at two in the morning, the morning before you’re supposed to meet, that they can’t do it, they can go to that link at 2am and pull themselves off for your calendar so you have, so when you wake up at six, you don’t have to worry about, you know, you can. You can see that they’ve said, Hey, I can’t do this. And so it and it just takes it off your calendar and they reschedule it to when they want.
There are also internal use bookings pages where this would work would be, if you had, you know, like the way, what I think about here is that, you know, when I go to, like, a, you know, to an orthopedic surgeon, or to a you know, or to, I don’t know, to my doctor, where I may see the doctor, I may see a nurse practitioner. With this bookings page, I can set this up so that the availability for all practitioners is on there, and then I can pick the spots in here, and then there can be resources. And so it’s a, again, it’s a tool that they can use to try to figure out, okay, when can I schedule anybody for this person to see on this kind of appointment? And so that’s the, you know, again, that’s the basics of it. I find it to be very helpful.
And again, I think it’s one of those tools that that again, you need to, you get, you need to get comfortable with. But again, you have in the internal booking page, you have all the all the appointment types, all the staff, all the times. And again, it will show people’s positions, their staff information shows the person’s availability on the scheduled day, so you can see whether they’re available or not. And again, if you have a team’s premium license, you can get text reminders and other things like that in here. So you know what’s any other observations on bookings? Or again, the booking of things in here. You
Randy Johnston 09:40
know, Brian, just as you were thinking about, I think about the old days of going back and forth in email, or, you know, some of the polls that people use when you get a lot of people trying to set this up,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:55
yeah, like, like doodle is one of the ones that that’s actually pretty helpful for. Finding a time when five people that are on different systems can meet, but again, knowing these tools exist can make a big difference. Make
Randy Johnston 10:07
a huge difference. And I can tell you that when I began using the calendar tools, and I’ve used many different ones just to see how they worked, the amount of time that it saves me, the amount of billable time that I can put on the calendar and get done is pretty stunning. One other thing though, that I would caution people on is you do have to have a little bit more calendar management to block time that you want to not get occupied so much like Brian explained. You know, early day, we seem to be better, clearer thinkers. I believe that to be true, but there are times when, let’s say, I’m going to an airport, and I haven’t been thoughtful about blocking the time that I need to get to the airport. So you need to manage your calendar so you block the time that you can speak or can’t speak or meet with people, but once you start using this, it’ll be a game changer for calendar management and time management. So any other parting thoughts from your side? Brian,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:16
you know, I think it’s, I think it’s a wonderful thing. I think it’s, again, this is another one of those tools that that’s in office, 365, that a lot of people don’t know about and they’ve never experimented with. But you know, for people, especially people that don’t have a lot of administrative support, this can be absolutely transformational, okay, and especially, especially with Gen Z, and with a lot of the the younger a lot of the younger millennials, many of them don’t want to talk to you, you know, they want to go pick the time out of that whenever they want to do it, and then they come to the meeting to accomplish whatever they have to do. And then they want to disappear and not see you again for a while. And so this, this allows them, allows you and them to asynchronously, pick a time when you can meet without having to invest a whole lot of time in the back and forth that we’ve done for so many years. So I think it’s, I think again, it’s one of the bigger no brainers in the history of Earth. It
Randy Johnston 12:15
certainly seems to be, well, this tool and many others in the Microsoft 365 family are worthy of your reflection. We have, you know, 20 to 30 tools. In fact, I should have a, a real number right off the top of my tongue, on the number of modules.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:35
But it changes so rapidly. They they they come in and they disappear. So it’s, it’s one of those things where, you know, even if you said there are 27 today and there will be 28 tomorrow, hell, there might be 30 or 15 by the end of the week. Yeah,
Randy Johnston 12:52
same way with this one family, you know, 5560, whatever. There’s dozens. We’ll just say that. How about that one? Brian, there’s dozens of modules inside Microsoft 365 Microsoft, go
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:07
ahead, we can channel our inner organo Carl Sagan, billions and billions of and billions of add ins,
Randy Johnston 13:16
yeah. So in the big picture, we know you already own it in Microsoft, 365 we just want you to use it so we appreciate you listening in. We’ll talk to you again soon in another accounting Technology Lab. You have a fine day, good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:35
Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor.
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