Practice by Numbers' Online Appointment Booking feature gives your patients 24/7 access to schedule appointments at their convenience. Whether it's a new patient exam or a child cleaning, this flexible tool helps streamline scheduling and keep your calendar full—with minimal manual input from your team.
This article walks you through a sample setup of Online Appointment Booking, showing the types of configurations you can apply to meet your practice’s needs.
Activating Online Appointment Booking
To begin:
Go to the Appointments module at the top of your navigation bar.
Click Settings in the left-hand menu.
Toggle the switch at the top-right corner to Active.
This activates your booking page and allows patients to access it via a unique URL (found under Widgets).
General Settings
PMS Sync Options
Auto-update the PMS with booked appointments: Enable this to have appointments automatically posted to your practice management system (PMS) in real time. This ensures any online booking fills actual availability in your system.
Alert and don’t auto-sync appointments for unmatched patients: When enabled, if a patient books an appointment but no match is found in your PMS, the system won’t sync the appointment. Instead, a new patient record is created. Disable this setting to allow more flexible scheduling, especially for new patients.
OTP verification (optional): Require patients to enter a one-time password via text to confirm their appointment booking. This can help reduce no-shows and spam submissions.
Days of the Week
In this section, you define the days of the week your practice accepts online bookings. This applies globally—regardless of provider or visit type. For example, if your office is closed on weekends, simply deselect Saturday and Sunday.
Chair Selection
Choose the chairs you want to include for online scheduling. These may represent operatories or treatment rooms. Only the selected chairs will be considered when offering time slots.
If a chair is used for internal admin time or special use cases, deselect it here to avoid online bookings for that space.
Insurance Settings
Click Setup Insurances to select from a list of insurance providers that your office accepts. If a particular plan isn’t listed, you can add custom entries.
You can also configure a custom message that appears after the patient submits their insurance info—for example, advising them that your team will verify coverage prior to the appointment.
Provider Setup
Select the providers available for online appointments. For each provider, you can:
Assign chairs they work in
Upload a photo and short bio
Enable or disable them for booking (via the toggle switch)
Click Edit to adjust settings such as blockouts or availability
Important: Make sure the provider is:
Marked Active in
Settings > EmployeesHas office hours set up under
Settings > Office and Provider Hours
This ensures they appear with correct availability during online scheduling.
Visit Types
Visit Types define the reason a patient is booking online (e.g., exam, emergency, cleaning). Each visit type allows you to customize the booking rules.
For each Visit Type, configure:
Name (e.g., "New Patient Exam")
Allowed Patients: New, Returning, or Both
Appointment Type (e.g., Hygiene, Consultation, Recall)
Duration (in minutes)
Assigned Providers and Chairs
Description: Provide guidance for patients, like what to expect or what to bring.
You can manage visit types for:
New patients
Existing patients
Emergency consults
Adult/child cleanings
Clear aligner consultations
Advanced Visit Type Settings (Gear Icon)
Click the gear icon next to any visit type to open Advanced Settings. These settings allow you to fine-tune appointment rules for that specific visit type. Here's a breakdown of the options:
Allowed Age: Set a minimum and maximum age range for this visit type. Ideal for limiting bookings to certain age groups (e.g., child cleaning vs. adult cleaning).
No Provider Selection: If enabled, patients will not be allowed to choose a provider. Useful for larger practices where provider assignment is done internally (e.g., Prophy appointments).
Don’t Auto Sync: Overrides the global auto-sync setting. When enabled, these appointments will not automatically post to the PMS. Instead, they’ll appear in your Action Center for manual review and approval.
Check Recall Date: Prevents patients from booking if they are not due for their recall. This setting relies on a valid recall date—if none is present, it will be ignored.
Soonest Appointment Available: Override the global soonest-available setting. You can define how many hours or days after today patients can start booking this specific visit type.
Farthest Appointment Available (Months): Override the global farthest-available setting. Set how many months into the future this visit type can be scheduled—ideally 7–8 months to accommodate recall visits.
These customizations ensure each visit type behaves exactly as your office needs—supporting age restrictions, recall cycles, and specific booking workflows.
Credit Card Collection (Optional)
If you’re using PbN Payments, you can enable Secure Credit Card Collection. This lets you require patients to enter a card to confirm their booking, which is ideal for no-show protection or deposits.
To enable:
Click “Enable Credit Card Collection” in this section.
Make sure PbN Payments is active on your account.
Custom Questions
You can add personalized questions for patients to answer when scheduling online. This is helpful for gathering additional information upfront—like preferred provider, referral source, or symptoms.
Example:
“Are you experiencing any pain or discomfort today?”
Click “Setup Custom Questions” to add or edit your list.
Appointment Availability
Customize how far out patients can book, how soon they can schedule, and how time slots are generated:
Key Settings:
Time Intervals: Choose between 10 or 15-minute slots
Soonest Available in Days: Prevents same-day bookings (e.g., allow bookings starting 1 day later)
Farthest Available in Months: Limits how far into the future patients can schedule
Provider Time Availability: This setting ensures that provider availability is considered when scheduling appointments. It must be enabled for accurate scheduling.
Use Practice and Provider Schedule From PMS: This setting syncs the practice and provider schedules from the PMS. Any changes made in the PMS will automatically reflect in PbN, ensuring that the online booking system is always up to date.
Use PMS Blocks for Visit Types (Open Dental/Dentrix only): This setting allows using PMS schedule blocks for different visit types. It provides more granular control over scheduling by restricting booking to specific time blocks defined in the PMS.
Prevent scheduling only for OpenDental blackouts: An additional setting is available for Open Dental users that allows them to modify how we view blocks on the schedule. By default, any block added to the schedule removes that time from the online appointment booking availability. The option below adjusts our settings to only remove times from blocks with Block Appointment Scheduling selected in Open Dental. This enables you to create blocks for appointment times that you still want available for online booking.
Scheduling Link & Widget
After configuration is complete:
Go to the Widgets tab.
Copy your scheduling link.
Customize your widget’s appearance (e.g., colors).
Embed or share the link via:
Website (as a button)
Email and text messages
Google Business, ads, or email signature
Web Chat widget
This is the public link that patients will use to self-book their appointments.
Multi-Location Setup
If your organization has multiple practice locations:
Click Multi Location Setup to separate appointment booking links per location.
Each location can have its own providers, chairs, and visit types.
This helps ensure patients are only booking at the appropriate practice.
Summary
Practice by Numbers' Online Appointment Booking makes it easy to:
Control exactly which providers, chairs, and services are available for booking
Keep your availability synced with your PMS
Collect credit card and insurance details up front
Customize the entire experience for your practice and patients