Changelog

1.23 — 10 July 2026

New Zealand

• Your Booking now supports New Zealand practices. Online booking runs on yourbooking.nz, patients identify with their NHI number instead of Medicare, and confirmations come from a .nz address. The booking module is available now; reminders and recalls for NZ follow in a later release.

Your brand

• Give your buttons their own colour. Branding settings gain a Button colour, so your booking page's buttons can carry a distinct accent — a mint-green "Book" button against navy links, for example — without changing the colour of links and headings. Light and dark mode each get their own value, and leaving it unset keeps today's look exactly.
• More fonts to choose from. The font list now includes Satoshi, a popular modern face that isn't available through Google Fonts.

Admin dashboard

• See what's new at a glance. The admin header now shows the Your Booking version you're running, with a "What's new" link straight to this page — and a small "New" badge whenever a release has shipped since you last looked.

Booking

• Both email and mobile are required when Recalls & Reminders is off. Without reminders, a booking confirmation can only reach the patient by email — while your practice software still wants the mobile. So when the reminders module is switched off, the booking flow now always asks for both, and the matching setting is locked on with a note explaining why. Practices with reminders on are unchanged.

Fixes

• Large reminder and recall runs can no longer lose messages to rate limits. Texts are now sent at a steady pace under the SMS provider's limit, and on the rare occasion one is throttled anyway, it's automatically retried rather than dropped.
• A clearer message when an appointment type is no longer available. If a type is removed or taken offline in your practice software after a patient has started booking, they now see "This appointment type is no longer available — please choose another or contact the practice" instead of a generic error.

1.22 — 6 July 2026

Reminders

• The reminder summary now checks your appointment book. Previously, a patient who confirmed by ringing the practice, at the front desk, or through their manage link — anything other than replying YES to the text — still appeared under "No response", so staff were asked to chase people who'd already confirmed. The summary now checks each appointment's live status before it's sent: patients who confirmed another way, rescheduled, or cancelled are moved out of the call list into their own "Since the reminders went out" section, and the Confirmed count includes every way a patient can confirm. If your practice connection happens to be offline when the summary is generated, it says so rather than silently reverting.
• Send a follow-up reminder to only the unconfirmed. With the summary now accurate, running two reminder rules together is fully supported — for example, a reminder two days out, then a next-day nudge sent only to patients who still haven't confirmed. Each rule's summary reports correctly, and patients who've already confirmed are never re-messaged.

Recalls

• Start recall automation cleanly after switching from another service. If your previous recall provider sent recalls for years without recording them in your practice software, those recalls still look "unsent" — and switching automation on would re-send all of them at once. A new option under Recall Automation fixes the history instead: enter the last date your old service sent recalls, preview exactly what's in the backlog, and confirm — everything due up to that date is marked as sent in your practice software, without a single message going out. Recall types you've excluded are left alone, so any lists your staff work through by hand stay intact.

Staff dashboard

• Call-queue notes are saved to the patient's record. Notes your staff type while working the recall call queue — including the running "no answer / left message" history — are now written into the patient's record in your practice software when the call wraps up (booked, declined, or moved to another channel). Nothing typed during a call is lost once the patient leaves the queue.

Booking

• The soonest-appointment list answers "how soon?" at a glance. Day headings now say Today, Tomorrow or in 2 days alongside the date, the "show more" controls are clearer about what they reveal, and an unhelpful badge that appeared on nearly every optometrist has been removed.

Fixes

• Mistyped email addresses are caught, not sent. An address like name@gm,ail.com is now caught while the patient books; if a bad address is already on file, the patient is simply asked for their email again — and the corrected address is saved back to your practice software. Reminders, recalls and feedback also check addresses before sending, and any that fail are named in your summary emails instead of disappearing.
• Optometrists rostered day-by-day are now bookable online. An optometrist whose hours are built directly in the appointment book — rather than as a weekly pattern — was previously invisible to patients booking online. Their real availability now shows, and the misleading "No active roster" badge is gone.
• Text replies stay out of Patient Chat when SMS Chat is off. Patient text replies no longer open conversations in a chat inbox you're not using — you still receive every reply by email and in the patient's record as usual.
• Your practice name shows in website embeds again. The booking window on your own website now displays your practice name unless you've chosen to hide the heading.

1.21 — 30 June 2026

Appointment types

• Restrict an appointment type to certain days and times. Some types should only be offered when your practice runs them — not because a room is busy, but by choice. On an appointment type's booking limits (the clock icon) you can now turn on Restrict by day and/or time and either set the same hours every day (for example, children's exams mornings only) or different hours on each weekday — for example, bulk-billing on Tuesday mornings and Thursday afternoons, and not offered on the other days. Patients only see times inside those windows, and the rule is re-checked when a booking is confirmed. Leave it off and the type stays bookable any working day, any time. Existing morning/afternoon windows carry over automatically.

New-patient availability

• Show new patients how soon you can see them. You can now add a live Book Now button to your own website that shows your soonest new-patient availability — for example, "Book Now — new patient appointments available tomorrow" — updated automatically from your real diary, so people see how quickly they can be seen before they even start booking. There's also an optional version that appears on your booking page. Both quietly hide themselves when you're fully booked or your practice is offline, so they only ever show good news. Turn either on under New-Patient Availability in Settings; the embed guide walks through adding the website button.

1.20 — 28 June 2026

AI-assisted setup

• Set up your appointment types with AI. When you first connect, Your Booking can configure your appointment types for you. Tell it what kind of practice you are, click Set up with AI, and it works out which types patients should be able to book online, who each one suits, a friendly description for each, and a sensible order — your everyday eye exam at the top, and back-office types like collections, dispensing and equipment left off. It's a starting point you review and adjust; nothing goes live until you're happy. Add a new type later and a single click sets up just that one, leaving everything you've already tuned untouched.
• Draft reminder & recall messages with AI. Writing message templates from a blank page is now optional. In the template editor, describe what you want — for example, "remind them of their appointment and to bring their current glasses" — and Your Booking drafts it for you, using the right wording for the message's purpose and how it's sent (a text reads like a text, a recall like a recall). For emails it can also create a nicely formatted version with a button in your practice's colours. You review and edit before saving.

1.19 — 25 June 2026

Your Booking now supports a second practice-management system: Sunix Vision. Practices running Sunix can take online bookings and send appointment reminders, with recall follow-ups available in beta. This release also lets you keep an individual optometrist off online booking, redesigns the optometrist setup card, and brings one-tap quick replies and booking links to the staff chat inbox.

Sunix Vision support

• Online booking on Sunix. Practices running Sunix Vision can now take bookings through Your Booking. New and returning patients book, reschedule, and cancel online, and the appointment is written straight into Sunix — staff see it in the appointment book just like any other booking.
• Appointment reminders on Sunix. Automated SMS reminders, confirmations, and replies all work on Sunix, and each reminder goes out on the patient's chosen channel. A sent reminder is marked against the appointment so staff can see at a glance that it went out.
• Recall follow-ups — in beta. Automated recalls against Sunix are available as a beta. If you'd like to trial recalls on Sunix, get in touch and we'll set you up.

Booking

• Hide an optometrist from online booking. You can now keep an individual optometrist off the online booking page while still managing their appointments as usual — handy for locums, or optometrists who only see pre-booked patients. The option is on the optometrist's profile.

Optometrist profiles

• Redesigned setup card. The optometrist card has a cleaner two-column layout and a simpler way to upload each optometrist's photo for the booking page.

Patient Chat

• Quick replies and booking links in the inbox. The staff chat inbox now has one-tap quick replies for common responses, a button to drop a booking link straight into a message, and inline actions on each conversation so you can act without leaving the thread.

Fixes

• Accurate optometrist rosters across branches. For multi-branch practices, which optometrists work at which branch is now read from each optometrist's per-branch setup rather than their most recently used branch — so the right optometrists show at the right branch.
• Clearer email-setup errors. When practice email settings have a port or security mismatch, the error now points at the likely cause instead of a generic failure.

1.18 — 17 June 2026

The headline is electronic Medicare bulk-billing agreements. From 1 July 2027 a verbal assignment of benefit is no longer enough, and Your Booking can now capture a compliant "I Agree" from the patient — on their own phone, at an in-practice kiosk, or from a link you send — and keep the signed form at your practice. This release also makes the booking page more forgiving when the earliest time slips away, routes "yes, but…" reminder replies to your inbox, brings completed appointments into the staff dashboard, and hardens the website chat embed.

Medicare bulk-billing agreement

• Capture the assignment of benefit electronically. Patients can read the agreement and tap I Agree on their own phone — from their appointment manage link or the booking-confirmed page — so a bulk-billed visit no longer needs a signature at reception. From 1 July 2027 this electronic (or physical) signature replaces the old verbal assignment. Turn it on under Settings → Medicare assignment of benefit.
• Or sign at an in-practice kiosk. Turn any spare tablet or screen into a self-service kiosk, paired to your practice with a code. Staff send the patient's form to the kiosk from the dashboard and the patient signs on the spot — no trip to the front desk.
• Send a link if they've already left. If a bulk-billed patient leaves without signing, staff can text or email them a link — chosen automatically from the patient's contact preference — to complete the form on their own device. If there's no way to reach them digitally, the dashboard shows a clear marker so you know to print and post the form from your practice software instead.
• Before or after the visit, worked out for you. Your Booking decides whether to show a "before the visit" agreement or an "after the visit" one that lists the item(s) actually billed — you don't have to choose. One signature covers every appointment that patient has that day, and a before-the-visit agreement is automatically voided if the date or optometrist changes.
• Your record, kept at your practice. The signed agreement is saved as a PDF on the computer running your booking agent — it's your legal record, and Your Booking does not store patient personal information centrally. A copy can be downloaded for the patient on request. (Remember to include that folder in your regular backups.)
• Set-up made straightforward. Each optometrist's Medicare provider number is held on their profile (filled in from your practice software where it's available). An optional "…or sign your Medicare form" prompt can be added to your reminder and manage-link messages — it only appears for patients who haven't signed yet. A step-by-step setup guide covers provider numbers, the kiosk, and (for Optomate practices) switching off Optomate's own bulk-billing prompt so patients aren't asked twice.

Booking

• The earliest time no longer dead-ends. If you chose the very first time offered and spent a minute on the form, that slot could slip under the "book at least N hours ahead" cut-off and the booking would fail with no way forward. The page now keeps a shown time bookable for a short while after it's offered, and if a time does lapse you're taken straight back to pick another — instead of being stuck re-submitting the same one.

Reminders & messages

• "Yes, but…" replies reach your inbox. A reminder reply that confirms but also asks something — e.g. "Yes, is there anything earlier?" — now both confirms the appointment and opens a conversation in your Chat inbox, so the question isn't lost. A plain "Yes" still just confirms, without cluttering the inbox.

Staff dashboard

• Completed appointments are now in the list. The appointments view is a full clinic view, not just reminder triage — finished visits stay visible so you can act on them (for example, push a post-visit Medicare form to the kiosk). Actions that no longer apply to a finished visit are shown greyed out.
• "Attended" at a glance. A patient who has arrived — waiting, in pre-test, with the optometrist, or finished — now shows a single Attended label, instead of a blank where you couldn't tell they'd turned up.
• Available/Away updates everywhere at once. Flipping your Available/Away status on one computer now updates every other open dashboard straight away, rather than up to a minute later.

Fixes

• No more reminders with a blank optometrist name. Appointments booked into a non-optometrist column — such as a dispenser column — were sometimes sent a reminder with the optometrist name left blank. These are now correctly left out of the reminder run.

Security & privacy

• Website chat embed hardened. For practices running the chat widget on their own website, the embed no longer shares its chat session with any other frame on the page — only with Your Booking itself — closing a gap where a third-party widget on the same page could have read it.

1.17 — 7 June 2026

This version introduces a change to the booking page and smart availability algorithm, making it easier to book two appointments next to one another. It also fixes a bug that prevented the display of late afternoon appointments, and adds new options for posting recall letters — window envelopes, printable address labels, and reprinting a batch.

Booking

• "Other times" for a day, alongside the preferred ones. The booking page still leads with the smart algorithm's Preferred times. If none suit, the patient can now open other times for that day — shown in the same list, in time order, in a lighter style — so it's obvious which times sit next to each other. That makes booking two appointments back-to-back (e.g. two children) easy, instead of the page only ever offering one time at a time.
• Choose how much of the schedule to open up. The Preferred Only setting has been renamed to Restrict presented slots (Settings → Smart Availability). With it on, only times that sit neatly against your existing bookings are shown. With it off, every available time is shown.
• Appointment length shown per optometrist. Each optometrist's card on the booking page now shows the length of the appointment being booked.

Recall letters

• Window envelopes. When printing recall letters you can now choose a window-envelope page size (A5 for C5 windows, or A4 folded for DL windows) so the patient's address prints where it shows through the envelope window — no labels needed. A fine-tune nudge lets you line it up exactly with your envelopes.
• Print address labels. Prefer labels? A new Print Labels button on the Print Queue prints a sheet of address labels (Avery L7160, L7159, L7163 or L7165) for the letters you're sending, in the same order as the letters. You can start partway down a part-used sheet, and a one-off alignment test on plain paper lets you nudge the labels to line up perfectly with your printer.
• Reprint a batch, or undo an accidental "mark as printed". If letters were marked as printed by mistake — or you simply need to print a past batch again — open that batch in Sent History and click Return to Print Queue. The letters come back to the queue so you can reprint them (all, or just the ones you need). It doesn't change the patient's record or re-send anything.

Fixes

• Late-day times before a booked appointment no longer hidden. A slot late in the day that sits just before an existing booking — rather than at your actual closing time — was sometimes dropped from the suggested times. It now shows correctly, so the last usable slots of a busy afternoon don't go missing.

1.15 — 5 June 2026

A polish release on top of Patient Chat — more conversations reach the inbox, and patients get chimed back when you reply after they've stepped away. A new header colour ties your branded emails and kiosk screen to your logo, with a colour picker and live preview. Plus stronger sign-in security, a daily booking cap that can run per optometrist, and a batch of website-embed fixes.

Patient Chat

• Texts out of the blue land in your inbox. A patient who texts your practice number unprompted — not replying to a reminder or recall — now opens a conversation in the Chat inbox so you can answer it there, instead of only generating an email alert. (Requires a dedicated SMS number; shared-number practices still get the email alert.)
• Patients get chimed back when you reply. Someone who sends a chat message and switches tab or app often missed your reply. The widget now plays a soft chime when your reply arrives and they're not looking at the page, and nudges first-time visitors to keep the page open — or leave a mobile number so you can text them instead.
• The Chat badge counts conversations already waiting. The unread badge on the Chat tab now reflects every conversation sitting in the inbox — including messages that arrived while the dashboard was closed or the laptop was asleep, and free-text SMS replies — not just ones that land while you're watching.
• Chat widget works properly on a phone when embedded. On practices running the booking page inside their own website, the chat button and panel could sit off-screen or push the message box below the fold on mobile. The widget now anchors sensibly and grows with the conversation.

Branding

• Set a header colour for emails and the kiosk. Choose a dedicated header colour (Settings → Branding) that backs the header of your branded emails and the kiosk welcome screen, so your logo sits on the one colour you picked it for. The header text and contact line auto-adjust (light on dark, dark on light) to stay readable on any colour. Existing practices are unchanged until they set one.
• Colour picker, live email preview, and a sample send. Every colour field now has a visual picker and accepts a pasted hex code — no need to know the colour format. A live preview shows how your branded email header will read, and a Send sample patient email button delivers a real branded email to any address so you can check it in a real inbox.
• More display fonts. Added Playfair Display, DM Serif Display and Bodoni Moda to the branding font list for practices using a high-contrast display serif.

Booking

• Daily limit can apply per optometrist. The "maximum per day" cap on an appointment type can now apply per optometrist rather than across the whole practice — so a limit of one means one each, not one in total. A toggle on the type's booking constraints chooses which.
• Hide the booking page heading when embedded. If your own website already has a "Book Online" heading, a new toggle in Domain Settings drops the booking page's own heading when it's embedded — without affecting your standalone booking subdomain.

Website embeds

• More reliable inside caching & performance plugins. Practices embedding on WordPress with a caching or JS-delay plugin (WP Rocket, LiteSpeed and similar) could see a collapsed or clipped booking frame. The recommended embed snippet now resists those plugins, holds a minimum height so it can't collapse, and sets the booking address in one place so it's harder to mis-configure.
• Mobile embed rendering fixed. The embedded booking page no longer clips at the bottom when your web font loads, no longer doubles up its border against your page on phones, and optometrist photos stay circular in narrow layouts.

Security & privacy

• Recovery codes now require passkey verification to regenerate. For practices using passkey-protected admin actions, generating a fresh set of recovery codes now requires passkey verification — the same protection as the other sensitive admin actions — so the codes can't become a way around it.
• Contact details scrubbed from delivery-error history. The occasional message/email delivery error recorded in history could contain a recipient's number or email. Those are now removed from the saved error text while the diagnostic message is kept — the last spot where a contact detail could linger in our records.

Smaller things

• Sent History badge tells you the outcome. The status on a sent reminder/recall now reads confirmed, cancelled, message or opted out at a glance, instead of a single "replied". A free-text "message" reply is a link straight to that conversation in the Chat inbox.
• Clearer post-visit feedback form. The feedback form is reordered so the comment box clearly belongs to the "tell us directly" path rather than the Google review button, which patients were mistaking for a way to add a comment to their Google review.
• Booking cut-off setting moved and renamed. The setting for how close to an appointment patients can no longer reschedule or cancel online now lives in Booking Rules as "Block reschedule/cancel within (hours)" — a clearer home and name. Same setting, same value, nothing to redo.
• Long pop-up dialogs scroll. A dialog taller than the screen now scrolls so its buttons stay reachable, instead of pushing them off the bottom.
• SMS short-domain described accurately. The custom SMS short-domain option is now described as a branding choice (your own domain in message links), not a cost saver — SMS links are already short by default.

1.14 — 29 May 2026

Patient Chat brings two-way patient messaging to Your Booking — a website chat widget plus SMS conversations, all in one staff inbox. Plus per-appointment-type booking limits — a daily cap and a time-of-day window — a slot picker that shows more dates by default, and groundwork for practice-management systems beyond Optomate. Admins and staff can now reset their own password, too.

Patient Chat

• A chat widget on your booking page. Patient Chat adds a chat button to your booking page — and, optionally, across your whole website — so visitors can message the practice directly, anonymously or identified against their record. Included on every plan.
• SMS chat from the staff dashboard. Start an SMS conversation with any patient, and free-text replies to reminders or recalls (anything that isn't a simple YES/NO) land in the same inbox instead of going unanswered — one place for every patient conversation, web or SMS.
• Built for the front desk. A shared inbox with unread badges and an optional chime, an Available/Away switch that controls what website visitors see, and a dashboard that installs as a desktop app so new-message alerts are reliable even when it's minimised.
• Nothing left lying around. When a conversation closes, the full transcript is saved to the patient's record as a patient note and emailed to the practice, then removed from Your Booking.

Signing in & passwords

• Reset your own password. Forgot your admin or staff password? There's now a "Forgot your password?" link on the sign-in page — enter your email and we'll send you a link to set a new one, so you're not waiting on us. (Works for accounts with an email on file.)
• Set your password on first login. When a new admin account is created, we can email you a link to choose your own password before you first sign in — so a password is never sent by email. The link stays valid for several days, so there's no rush to use it.
• Usernames are no longer case-sensitive. "Admin", "admin", and "ADMIN" all sign in the same — one less thing to trip over.

Booking flow

• Slot picker shows more dates by default. A safety cap on the slot search was silently truncating dense-schedule results at around two weeks even when the configured booking window was longer (e.g. 90 days). The cap is now ten times higher; busy practices get the full window's worth of slots without needing to override the setting.
• Friendlier name matching when two patients share a surname and date of birth. If two patients on the same record have the same surname and date of birth (e.g. siblings), the identify step used to drop the patient to the Medicare-confirmation screen even when the given name made the match obvious — a Robert and a Stephanie at the same DOB couldn't be told apart even if the patient typed "Rob". The given-name now disambiguates: if exactly one of the candidates' given names is a sensible match for what was typed (exact, nickname, or prefix), that one is selected and the patient continues straight to booking. Ambiguous cases (both candidates plausible) still fall through to Medicare, as before.

Appointment booking limits

• Cap how many of a type can be booked per day. Set a maximum-per-day on any appointment type — for example "no more than 2 home visits a day". Once a day is full, it stops appearing for that type. Leave blank for no limit.
• Restrict a type to a time of day. Offer a type only within a daily window — say children's exams mornings only. The whole appointment must fit inside the window, and you can set an earliest, a latest, or both.

Admin

• "Follow-up emails" are now "Pre-visit emails". The per-appointment-type email that goes out when a patient books is renamed to Pre-visit email — a clearer name, since it sends before the visit. Same feature, same setup: look for Pre-visit Email on the appointment type and the Pre-visit column on the staff Appointments dashboard. See Pre-visit Emails.

Under the hood

• Groundwork for supporting practice-management systems beyond Optomate. A large internal refactor lifts Optomate-specific code paths behind a vendor-neutral protocol so other practice-management systems can plug in alongside it. No user-visible change yet; the work surfaces in this release as the underpinning for several small reliability and performance wins across the booking, reminder, recall, feedback, and chat-archive flows.

1.13 — 21 May 2026

Recall handling lines up cleanly with Optomate's Initial+Subsequent model. Recall follow-up steps now lock once they've been sent so a mid-flight edit can't open a cohort gap. Plus a billing accuracy fix — feedback sent by email is no longer counted as SMS.

Recalls

• Optomate Initial + Subsequent recall chains handled correctly. Optomate models a recall chain as one Initial row plus a series of Subsequent rows that activate as the chain advances. Your Booking now sends only on Initial rows — Subsequents are managed inside Optomate as part of the same chain. A catch-up sweep at the end of each recall run marks activated Subsequents as sent so they don't pile up dormant in Optomate's queue. If a practice ever switches a channel back to Optomate-managed sending later, there's no accumulated backlog waiting to fire.
• Recall follow-up steps lock once they've gone out. Editing a step's Days after initial send after patients have already received it (or removing the step entirely) used to silently create cohort gaps — patients sent step 1 at the old cadence wouldn't get step 2 at the new cadence. The editor now disables the field and shows a lock icon on any step that's already fired, with an inline hint to create a new rule if you want a different cadence. New steps must extend the cadence forward (strictly greater delay than the existing last step). Schedule shape itself (weekly / monthly anchor, anchor date, etc.) stays editable on a fired rule — in-flight patients ride their own clocks regardless.
• "Delay (days)" relabelled to remove ambiguity. The field is now Days after initial send in the editor and "Step 1 · 14 days after initial" in the read-only summary. Section subtitle spells out the model explicitly: "Delays are days from the initial recall send — not from the previous step." No behaviour change, clearer wording.

Billing accuracy

• Email feedback no longer counted as SMS. Practices sending post-visit feedback by email were seeing those sends inflate the SMS usage figure on the Accounts page. Each feedback send is now correctly classified as SMS or email, and only the SMS sends count toward your SMS bill. The correction applies retroactively to historical sends, so your displayed usage reflects actual SMS sends only.

Smaller things

• SMS manage-link click no longer 500s. A regression introduced during a recent manage-token refactor was causing the manage link on SMS reminders to fail with a server error. Any practice running SMS reminders with manage links was affected. Fixed; manage-link clicks now resolve normally.

1.12 — 12 May 2026

Privacy hardening on the booking page — patient details no longer travel to the browser. Plus the staff dashboard is now installable as a desktop app.

Privacy hardening

• Patient details no longer travel to the browser. The data the booking page sends to a patient's browser no longer contains any Optomate-sourced address, full email, full mobile, Medicare number, gender, title, marketing preferences, or last-consultation dates. The patient still sees enough of their email and mobile to recognise it — masked as jo***@gmail.com and 04xx xxx 678 — with a Change button to retype if needed. Closes a path where someone with a patient's name and date of birth could pull the matched record's contact details out of the browser's Network tab.
• Cross-branch register copies records server-to-server. When a patient registers at a sibling branch, their identity, address, title, gender, and Medicare are copied from the source branch's record without ever crossing the browser. The patient is only asked for fields the source branch genuinely doesn't have.
• Booking confirmation no longer renders the email address. The success screen reads A confirmation email has been sent to your email address — no value shown, since the patient already knows their own email.

Installable staff dashboard

• Install the staff dashboard as a desktop app. Chrome or Edge will offer an install prompt on any /staff page. Once installed, the dashboard runs in a dedicated app window with no browser chrome.
• Start at login via the browser's built-in PWA app-settings — the dashboard comes up automatically when reception's machine boots.

Smaller things

• Patient STOP terminates the whole recall chain in sent history. A patient texting STOP to any follow-up message in a recall chain now correctly marks the entire chain as terminated — including the original recall send. The chain was already stopping; only the sent-history badge was misleading.

1.11 — 9 May 2026

Multi-branch recall booking — patients can switch siblings inside the recall flow. Plus clearer email-setup errors with deep-links into the setup guide.

Multi-branch booking

• Cross-branch recall booking. On a multi-branch practice, a patient who taps a recall link can now switch to a sibling branch inside the booking flow — including when each branch has its own Optomate database. Their identity is copied across server-to-server; if the destination branch already has their contact details and Medicare on file, they aren't asked again.
• Practice email flags cross-branch bookings. When a patient with a recall from one branch ends up booking at a sibling, the practice notification email carries a Recall came from another branch notice naming the source — handy for reception cross-reference.
• Branch picker shows offline siblings as offline. If a sibling's Optomate is unreachable mid-flow, the picker disables the switch button instead of letting the patient through to a register form that would fail at submit.

Recall reliability

• Source-offline fallback on multi-branch business hosts. If the recall's home Optomate is temporarily unreachable, the patient is offered the standard identify form so they can book at an online sibling instead of seeing a dead end.
• No flash of this link is no longer valid when refreshing the booking page after a successful recall booking.

Email setup

• Test-email errors surface the real reason. The Send Test Email button used to swallow SMTP exceptions and just say check SMTP settings. Now reports the actual server response and deep-links into the relevant section of the setup-email guide — much faster to diagnose Microsoft 365 Security Defaults, SMTP-AUTH-disabled, or DNS issues.
• Setup-email guide expanded for Microsoft 365. Now covers both switches that block SMTP AUTH on modern M365 tenants — per-mailbox Authenticated SMTP and tenant-wide Security Defaults / Conditional Access — plus new troubleshooting rows for 535 5.7.139 and 535 5.7.3.

Smaller things

• Trial state on the Accounts tab. Practices on a trial see a one-line Trial: 18 days left — ends 7 Jun 2026 under the included-features badges. Switches to red when the trial expires.
• Per-subdomain passkeys. Passkeys enrolled on a practice subdomain stay scoped to that subdomain — no more bleeding into pickers on sibling subdomains. Existing passkeys keep working; re-enrol per subdomain when convenient.

1.10 — 6 May 2026

Optional two-factor verification for sensitive admin actions, plus recall pipeline polish and unified date formatting.

Two-factor verification (optional)

• New Two-factor verification setting in Settings. Off by default. When you turn it on, sensitive actions — editing templates, managing admin users, changing SMTP or domain settings — ask for your passkey first. Routine work isn't affected.
• Setup is in a new Security button in the admin header (replaces Change Password). Recovery codes shown once at first enrolment, in case you lose your devices.
• Same dialog has Sign out all devices — invalidates every sign-in across browsers if you suspect a session is compromised. Account-security events (password change, passkey added, etc.) also email all admins.
• Every admin needs an email before you can turn 2FA on — that's where the alerts go.

Recall pipeline polish

• "Send via SMS" from the call queue no longer produces a blank booking link.
• Step-specific follow-up templates work again — separate "two-week", "30-day", "long-overdue", "one-year" wording renders correctly instead of falling back to the initial-send template.
• Phone-call scripts in the call queue include last optometrist, last exam date, time since last exam, and the full recall description.
• "About 2 years" for a 35-month-overdue patient now reads as "about 3 years".

Smaller things

• New Always require email and mobile toggle in Settings → Booking Rules. Off by default. When on, patients must provide both contact methods to complete a booking — useful if you want a complete contact record on every appointment regardless of reminder-channel preference.
• Dates in templates read consistently as 15 May 2026 across reminders, recalls, follow-ups, and letters. New {LAST_CONSULTATION} placeholder.
• Sign-in session length lifted from 8 hours to 12.
• Edit-user pencil icon in the Users list — change email and role from one place.
• BIMI: emails from us show our logo in inbox previews on Yahoo, Fastmail, and Apple Mail.

1.9 — 30 April 2026

Email asked at the end of the booking, not the start. Plus optional email reminders, post-visit feedback by email, a recommended appointment type for returning patients, and a smarter duplicate check.

Feedback by email

• Post-visit feedback can now go by email as well as SMS. New Feedback channel setting in Reminders & Recalls → Feedback: Patient preference (the default — uses each patient's marketing preference in Optomate), SMS, or Email.
• Forced channels stay within patients who already accepted electronic marketing — a patient set to Letter or Phone in Optomate is still skipped, regardless of which channel you pick. Marketing opt-out is always respected.
• New Default Feedback Email template available in Templates for every practice — seeded automatically. Edit the wording before switching the channel on; or just leave it as-is.

Template editor — clearer custom HTML state

• When an email template has Custom HTML set, the Custom HTML section now auto-opens with an "In use" pill on its header, and the plain-text body shows a short note that the HTML below will be used instead (plain text is still sent as the multipart fallback). A clearer chevron on the Custom HTML row makes it obvious it's expandable.

Email at the end, not the start

• The email field is gone from the patient-ID step. Patients are asked for their contact details at the very end, on the same screen where they confirm the booking.
• For an existing patient, email and mobile show as masked previews ("•••••@gmail.com", "04•• ••• 234") with a Change button — no plain-text on-file values rendering on the screen unless they actively change them.
• At least one of email or mobile is required. (If you don't have email reminders turned on, mobile is still required, same as before.)
• Booking confirmations can now go by SMS. A patient who doesn't supply an email still gets their confirmation — by SMS to the mobile they did give. Previously the confirmation was email-only, so a patient with no email on file could silently get nothing.
• Recall confirmations now follow the same channel rule as regular bookings — the 1.8 always-SMS override is no longer needed.
• Refreshing the page mid-booking no longer drops the patient back to the start. Branch, appointment type, slot, and contact details are preserved for 30 minutes (same for the recall flow).

Email reminders, if you want them

• New setting: Allow email for reminders. When on, patients with both an email and a mobile see a quick channel picker at the end of their booking — SMS or email for the reminder. Email confirmations are sent regardless; only the reminder channel is the patient's choice.
• The toggle is gated on you having an active appointment-reminder email template. We'll point you at the templates tab if you flip it on without one configured.

Recommended appointment type

• When a returning patient lands on your booking page, we look at their next recall and put a Recommended tag on the matching appointment type. They can still pick anything else, but the right choice is highlighted.
• Works whether the patient tapped through from an SMS recall or just typed your booking URL — same recommendation either way.
• Two new dials in Reminders & Recalls → Config: when the recommendation should start showing (default: from 90% through their recall cycle) and when it should stop (default: 60% past their recall date).

Smarter duplicate check

• The [DUPE?] flag on the practice booking notification email is now typo-aware. A surname or given-name typo with matching contact details (Smyth vs Smith), a single-digit DOB typo, or an exact rebook are all caught.
• Family false-positives gone: a parent and child sharing a mobile, spouses sharing an email, and twins (same surname and DOB, different given names) are no longer flagged as duplicates.
• Faster too — one Optomate lookup instead of up to three.

Smaller things

• The recall timing and reminder-channel settings (manage link cutoff, recall link expiry, recommendation window, allow-email-for-reminders) are now grouped together in Reminders & Recalls → Config, next to SMS Configuration.
• Reminder summary emails now honour your day-of-week overrides. If a Tuesday reminder rule has a different summary delay, that delay is used instead of the rule's default.
• Refreshing the page after a recall booking now shows the confirmation again, instead of a "link already used" error.
• If your website forwards a tap to your booking iframe via a path (e.g. /bX9p2k) instead of a query string, the iframe now reads either form — no extra setup needed.

1.8 — 27 April 2026

Shorter SMS links via your own short domain, permission checks before you turn modules on, and a refreshed look for staff and admin pages.

Short SMS links

• You can now have a custom short domain like lak.au hosted by us — your SMS links read lak.au/bX9p2k instead of the longer subdomain form. Set it up self-serve from your Domain settings: enter the domain, point its DNS at us with one click of Check DNS, and we'll handle the SSL certificate. More on website integration.
• Three integration tiers documented: standalone (links go to your subdomain on our site), basic (iframe + your booking URL), and full (above plus the custom short domain). Pick the one that suits.

Permission checks before you flip a module on

• When you turn on Reminders, Recalls, or Feedback, we check the necessary Optomate API permissions are in place before saving — and show you exactly which ones are missing if not. No more enabling a module and then wondering why nothing's happening.
• Optomate's Patient Read permission has a "Restricted" mode that hides the fields we need (mobile, email, appointment preferences). We now flag this clearly so you can switch it off in Optomate before continuing.

Look and feel

• Staff dashboards and practice admin now wear Your Booking's brand — cream backgrounds, slate accents, consistent typography. Your patient-facing booking page is unchanged and continues to wear your practice's brand.
• Patient confirmation, cancellation, and reschedule emails now lead with your practice's primary colour and logo, with a clean cream footer carrying your branch address.
• Refreshed Your Booking logo across the marketing site and admin pages, with an animated splash on the dashboards.

Smaller things

• Recall confirmations are now always sent via SMS. Email confirmations could silently miss if a patient's email was stale or wrong, with no way for them to tell us.
• Our public demo at demo.yourbooking.au now opens with a guided banner — sample patient names to try, suggestions for what to look at, and a link straight into the demo admin. Easier to send colleagues to.

1.7 — 22 April 2026

You can now see what you're paying for.

• New Billing tab in your admin. Shows your plan, what you pay each month (subscription plus any dedicated SMS number), and your SMS usage this month and last, split by reminders, recalls, and feedback.
• Live SMS cost estimate in the template editor — character count, number of SMS parts, cost per send, with a warning if a small change would push a message from one billed SMS into two.
• Appointment dates automatically use a short form in SMS ("Wed 24 Apr") and the full form in email ("Wednesday, 24/04/26"). Often the difference between one and two billed SMS.
• Cloud-hosted practices: the first booking of the morning is now as fast as every subsequent one.

1.6 — 19 April 2026

Feedback overhaul, plus polish for multi-branch practices and richer branding.

Feedback

• Thumbs up / thumbs down on the feedback page. Even patients who don't leave a full review give you a signal.
• The feedback page is now a single screen — both the Leave a Google review and Send privately buttons appear together with equal weight, instead of the previous two-step split.
• New Reporting card on the Feedback tab: how many feedback requests were sent, opened, responded to, and clicked through to Google over the last 30 days, plus a sentiment split, a 12-week trend, and the most recent responses.
• Private feedback emails to the practice now look like your SMS reply notifications, with the patient's name and whether they also clicked through to Google.

Multi-branch

• SMS, email, letter, and telephone recall toggles set at one branch now apply to every branch automatically — no more repeating the change at each one.
• Copy feedback settings from one branch to all the others with a single click.
• The Enabled switch for recall automation is now on the main card, so you can turn it off without clicking Edit.
• Next-run times are hidden when automation is switched off (they were misleading otherwise).

Branding

• Pick separate fonts for headings and body text, so the booking page matches your website's typography more closely.
• Three new fonts added to the picker.

1.5 — 18 April 2026

We store less patient data.

• Your Booking no longer keeps patient names, phone numbers, email addresses, or the text of SMS replies in our database. Reply text is written into the patient's Optomate record instead — into the appointment's Comments for reminders, and into a Patient Note for recalls and feedback — and loaded from there when you need to see it.
• Sent History search by phone or email now searches Optomate directly, so results stay accurate no matter how long ago the message went.
• Staff see a YES / NO / STOP / MESSAGE badge on each replied row in Sent History. Click the row to load the full reply.
• You can now pick a default template for Send manage link messages, instead of the system re-using whichever template went out most recently.
• Switching tabs or closing the page with unsaved edits now prompts you, rather than silently dropping the change.
• Needs one extra Optomate permission: Patient Notes (Read and Create). It's a separate permission from Patients — ticking one doesn't tick the other. See the Reminders setup guide.

1.4 — 18 April 2026

Appointment pre-visit emails.

• Attach an email to any appointment type and it sends automatically when a patient books. Useful for intake forms, "what to bring" notes, or pre-visit prep. See Pre-visit Emails.
• Staff can also send the pre-visit email manually from the appointments list — for walk-ins and phone bookings.
• Available to every practice. You don't need the Recalls & Reminders module.
• The Templates tab is now a top-level menu item, always visible.
• Click a placeholder chip in the template editor and it drops into whichever field your cursor is in, rather than always appending to the body.

1.3 — 17 April 2026

More for multi-branch practices.

• If your branches share one Optomate, you now only need one agent install to cover all of them.
• When a patient replies STOP or unsubscribes from email at one branch, the opt-out applies to their record at every other branch automatically.
• Recalls are skipped for patients who've been seen or booked at another of your branches recently — no more "I was just at the other branch yesterday" calls.
• New Branch Sync buttons let you push settings, templates, appointment types, and recall setup to every branch (or copy from another branch) with one click.

1.2 — 13 April 2026

Multi-branch booking.

• Group multiple branches under one business with a shared booking page. Patients only identify themselves once, and the system picks the right branch for returning patients automatically.
• Share one SMS sender number across all branches.
• Copy appointment types between branches — overwrite all, copy from one branch, or push only the new types.
• Confirm, reschedule, and cancel links work across all branches of a business.
• New Website Booking URL setting. Email links can point directly to your website's booking page — no more website redirect rules needed for simple setups.
• Fixed: patients with an apostrophe in their surname (O'Brien, O'Connor) could occasionally fail to book.

1.1 — 10 April 2026

Support for cloud-hosted Optomate.

• Practices with Optomate hosted in the cloud no longer need the Windows agent — Your Booking connects to Optomate directly.
• Reminders, recalls, feedback, and SMS replies all work for cloud-connected practices, not just agent practices.
• Kiosk mode for iPad sign-in: add ?kiosk to the booking URL for larger text and touch targets.
• The staff appointments panel now has a refresh button and shows when the data was last updated.
• Fixed: the staff appointments list occasionally showed bookings on the wrong day when opened before 10am.

1.0 — 10 April 2026

First release. Live for paying practices.

Patient booking

• Your own branded booking page — logo, colours, fonts, your domain. Embedded on your existing website so patients always see your brand.
• Patients are identified by name and date of birth before they see availability, so bookings always land on the correct patient record.
• New, recent, and inactive patients see different appointment types, with age filtering.
• Scheduling packs the day tightly so you don't end up with unusable 15-minute gaps.
• Per-optometrist availability, with shared equipment (visual field machines, OCTs) handled automatically.
• Self-service SMS or email links for patients to confirm, reschedule, or cancel.

Reminders, recalls, feedback

• Automated SMS or email reminders, configurable per practice (days before, send time, day-of-week overrides, overrides per appointment type).
• Recall follow-up sequences with multiple steps across SMS, email, letter, and phone, routed to each patient's preferred channel.
• Two-way SMS: Y/N confirmations and STOP opt-outs. STOP flows through to Optomate's marketing opt-out flag automatically.
• Reply notification emails to your practice for anything that isn't a simple Y/N.
• Daily reminder and recall summary emails.
• Post-visit feedback flow offering the patient a Google review or a private message to the practice.

Staff dashboard

• Daily appointment view showing the reminders sent for each appointment.
• Sent History search across reminders, recalls, and feedback.
• Call queue for telephone-channel recalls and a print queue for letter recalls.
• Manual send and stop-followup controls for recalls.

Behind the scenes

• Three-layer database backups: nightly on the server, nightly offsite to a separate machine with 90-day retention, plus daily full-server snapshots.
• Monitoring for both the booking site and each practice's agent, with email alerts if anything drops.