Support: Appointments & Google Calendar
If you have Push Appointments to Google Calendar ***** checked in your Profile, the following actions will push appointments to your Google Calendar:
- Add new lead: select Next Appointment Date / Time & submit your lead.
- Follow Up form: select Next Appointment & submit.
- Prospect Sleuth Appointment Calendar: add, edit, delete, or reschedule an appointment will push updated data to Google.
You must be logged in at Google for the Calendar Push to operate. Chances are you are already logged in at Google and you will only need to check the box on your Profile tab. If not, Google will prompt you to login when you go to your PS calendar, New Lead or Follow Up form. And may also ask permission for Prospect Sleuth to to manage your calendar.
One-way data PUSH: Non Prospect Sleuth related appointments & updated data are not pulled from Google however, to keep the system calendar focused on your leads. Please allow some time after you submit an appointment at Prospect Sleuth before it appears in your Google Calendar. Sometimes you need to fully refresh your Google Calendar or close and re-open your app to see the appointment immediately.
Prospect Sleuth Calendar: Appointments will also be added to you local PS Appointment Calendar by the actions above. You can double click a time slot to add an appointment in any of the 3 views (Day, Week, Month, Timeline). Existing appointments support drag and drop and re-sizing as well to edit/reschedule the time.
If you are on a mobile device, tap and hold down a time to slot to add or edit an appointment. By default appointments are assigned to the logged in user. You may also assign an appointment to any users that are reporting to you down the hierarchy. Appointments will also show up in the user's To Do list.
Click to export the visible appointments in your calendar to Excel.
Calendar Key: Appointments for other Users that report to you Your appointments - hover on these appointments for details.
*** Disclaimer: Prospect Sleuth's code to work with Google Calendar API is fully tested. But occasionally there is an error making a call or returning data from Google's servers. We try to post a helpful Warning: message if there is an error at Google. Usually just continuing as normal or refreshing your page and trying again will fix any issues. Sometimes a server is down at Google and you need to wait a while and it resolves itself. You may also try clearing your browser's cache and possibly restarting your browser. Please let us know if you experience issues that do not go away, we will resolve these issues ASAP.
You may also try clicking 'Refresh Google Calendar Authentication' on your Profile form to try and manually re-authenticate.
Javascript and Cookies need to be enabled in your browser for the calendar and any part of the Prospect Sleuth system.
Time Zones
Time zones can be a little confusing. At least when trying to manage an online calendar. If the earth wasn't round and didn't rotate this would not be a problem.
After our market research, we found that Google Calendar was one of the best online calendars for organizing your events and appointments. However, some users who travel
often do not like that Google will move their appointments around on them, based on what time zone they are in ***. They have somewhat helped ease this problem by allowing you
to select different time-zones for your start and end times of an appointment. If you are unfamiliar with it,
read about Google Calendar first to become familiar with it. They have both a
desktop calendar and a smart phone app. You will be using Google Calendar to receive your alerts about upcoming appointments. Alerts are not built into Prospect Sleuth, that is why we push
the appointments out to Google and let them handle it.
You have to be logged into your Google Account before Prospect Sleuth can push appointments to your calendar. You will be prompted to log in at Google if you are not already.
Appointments will always be stored in your local PS calendar, even if you are not using our paid membership version.
Prospect Sleuth is known for its simplicity. PS does not store or worry about your time zone, we let Google worry about that. PS stores your appointments separately in our calendar as well, it is a personal calendar just for you and is treated as local time. PS's
appointment calendar uses absolute time *, or local time. Meaning whatever time you select for an appointment, it does not change if you travel to a different location or time zone.
That appointment will be pushed to Google and saved as whatever time zone you have by default in your Google account. When daylight savings time hits, your appointment times do not change.
However, when you travel, depending on your Google settings, they may switch your time zone and hence change your time on your appointment and its alerts **. So again, make sure you know how Google works and
have your settings adjusted accordingly. If you do not travel much, none of this should be a problem.
This is part of the reason we do not SYNC to Google Calendar. Meaning we
do not pull appointments and changed information from google calendar.
We want your Prospect Sleuth calendar to just show you appointments
related to your leads.
If you do wish to change your time zone in Google Calendar, making the change in one program will not automatically update your time zone in another program. For example if you change your time zone settings in your web browser based google calendar, it will not automatically update your time zone in your smart phone's mobile app, and vice versa.
* An example of absolute/local time: lets say that every day you have to take a certain medication at 1PM. It does not matter what time zone you are in. It is the time where you plan on being when the event happens. Just like if you had it written down on a paper calendar.
** You have an appointment set for 12PM pacific standard time while you are in San Diego, CA. You travel to Green Bay, WI and now your appointment time has been automatically adjusted to 2PM. This is how your Google Calendar will operate by default, unless you manually change time zones on specific events or on your global calendar settings.
*** UTC: Coordinated Universal Time - Google Calendar's events are created & converted into UTC, but you will always see them in your local time.
***** Google Calendar functionality is reserved for paid members.