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Appointment Pre-visit Emails

Send a branded email with additional information after a patient books a specific appointment type — or from the staff dashboard for walk-ins and phone bookings.

Common uses:

Pre-visit emails are part of the core YourBooking admin feature set — they don't require the Recalls & Reminders module. Email is sent from your practice's email account (or our shared sender if you haven't set up your own).

This guide applies to practices on either Optomate Touch or Sunix Vision. The only place the two differ is which appointment types can carry a pre-visit — see the callout under Notes and constraints.

How it works

Automatic send (online booking): When a patient books an appointment online, YourBooking sends the confirmation email, your practice notification email, and then the pre-visit email — one after the other, in the background. The patient typically sees the confirmation and the pre-visit arrive within a minute of each other.

Manual send (any appointment): From the staff dashboard's Appointments panel, the Pre-visit column shows a Send button for any appointment whose type has a pre-visit configured. Click to send the email on demand. This covers walk-ins and phone bookings that staff entered directly into your practice system, which don't trigger the automatic path.

Setup

1. Create the pre-visit template

  1. In the admin, open the Templates tab.
  2. Click New Template.
  3. Pick Pre-visit for Scope and Email for Channel.
  4. Give it a name (e.g. "Child Intake Form"), a subject line, and the body.
  5. Use placeholders like {PATIENT_FIRST_NAME}, {APPOINTMENT_DATE}, {APPOINTMENT_TIME}, {APPOINTMENT_TYPE}, {OPTOMETRIST_NAME}, {PRACTICE_NAME}, {PRACTICE_PHONE}, {BRANCH_NAME}, {BRANCH_ADDRESS}. Full placeholder reference is shown in the template editor.
  6. Save.

Tip — draft it with AI: In the template editor, click Draft with AI, describe the message in a sentence, and Your Booking writes it for you. For the email body, Create HTML version turns it into a nicely formatted version with a button in your practice's colours — review and Preview before saving. See Draft a template with AI.

Adding a link (intake forms, etc.)

To include a link — for example to a new-patient or welcome form — put the web address on its own line in the body:

Please complete our welcome form before your visit:

https://your-practice.com.au/welcome-form

Most email apps turn a plain web address into a clickable link automatically, so this is usually all you need.

If you want a styled button, or the link guaranteed clickable in every email app, use the Custom HTML field instead and add a standard HTML link:

<p><a href="https://your-practice.com.au/welcome-form">Complete your welcome form</a></p>

Click Preview to confirm it looks right before saving. If HTML isn't your thing, just send us your wording and link and we'll set the template up for you.

2. Attach the template to an appointment type

  1. Open the Appointment Types tab.
  2. Click the mail icon on the appointment type you want to link.
  3. In the Pre-visit email dialog, pick the template you just created and click Save.
  4. Click Save changes on the Appointment Types tab to apply.

The mail icon turns solid once a pre-visit is configured. No templates yet? The dialog has a link straight to the Templates tab so you can create one.

3. (Optional) Test it

Notes and constraints

Which appointment types can carry a pre-visit

Pre-visit configuration lives on the appointment type (same as reminder template overrides and feedback filters), so the type has to be visible to YourBooking first. How that works depends on your practice system.

Optomate: the type must be marked Available Online in Optomate — otherwise YourBooking can't see it. Types flagged as staff-only or walk-in-only are invisible to YourBooking. If you have a type that's deliberately staff-only (e.g. to keep walk-ins separate from online bookings in your workflow) and you still want it to send a pre-visit:

  1. In Optomate, tick Available Online on the type.
  2. In YourBooking's Appointment Types tab, turn off all three of the New / Recent / Inactive toggles. The type then disappears from patient-facing booking, but you can still use it for pre-visit emails, reminder overrides, feedback filters, and so on.

The type can still be picked by staff in Optomate, and the pre-visit will send via the staff dashboard's manual button.

Sunix: there's no "Available Online" flag — every appointment type can carry a pre-visit. To keep a type out of patient-facing booking while still using it for pre-visit emails, turn off its New / Recent / Inactive toggles in YourBooking's Appointment Types tab.

Archived types still work

If an appointment type is deactivated (Active toggle off), it's archived — patients can't book it, but existing appointments of that type still exist in your practice system. The staff dashboard's Send button still appears for those appointments so you can follow up on historical bookings if needed.

Email address is required

The pre-visit won't send if the patient has no email on file. The staff dashboard indicates this with "No email" in the Pre-visit column.

No SMS pre-visit emails (yet)

Pre-visit emails are email-only in this release. If you want to nudge by SMS instead, use the existing Send manage link flow with a custom Manage-link SMS template that includes the booking link placeholder. See the Reminders setup guide for details.

Multi-branch

Pre-visit template assignments move with the appointment type when you use the Branch Sync button on the Appointment Types tab. The target branch needs a matching template (same name, channel, scope) for the assignment to carry over — so sync templates first, then sync appointment types. If the target doesn't have the template, the pre-visit field at the target is simply left blank rather than pointing at the wrong template.