External calendars: connect your diary via ICS

What is possible and what is not

There is no sync with Google Calendar or Outlook, and no connection by signing in with an account. "External calendar" is simply the name the panel gives to a connection through an ICS link. If you edit or delete an event in the external calendar, the bookings in 4appointments are not changed. Anyone who uses Google Calendar or Outlook therefore keeps managing personal commitments in that app and uses 4appointments for the booking diary.

• There are three options: importing busy times from an external calendar, importing a one-off ICS file as bookings, and exporting each provider's diary.
• There is no two-way sync and no native Outlook, Apple or CalDAV connection.
• Changes in the external calendar never change a booking.
• Each team member can subscribe to up to 3 external calendars.

Importing busy times and one-off bookings through ICS

In the "External calendar" section, a team member can subscribe to the calendar they already use, using an https ICS address. Its events then block those times in availability, so nobody books over them. The calendar is read again roughly every 15 minutes, and events marked as free are ignored. If you keep a diary elsewhere and want to move it across in one go, the same section lets you import an ICS file as confirmed bookings. That import is a one-off with limits: only events starting within the next 60 days are brought in, the file cannot exceed 2 MB, and past or overlapping events are ignored. The event title becomes the client name, and no email addresses or phone numbers are imported, so add them by hand. No live link remains afterwards, so events created later in the old calendar do not come across. Check the result before giving up the old diary.

Taking the bookings onto your phone

Each provider has their own ICS link for export. If you subscribe to it from your phone's calendar, the bookings appear alongside your personal commitments. How often the calendar refreshes is decided by your calendar app, not by 4appointments. The free note the client wrote when booking may appear in the event description, and each team member's own link shows only their bookings. Treat the link as confidential: anyone who has the address can subscribe to it.

• Get the ICS export address for the provider from the panel.
• Subscribe to it from your phone's or computer's calendar app, using its subscribe-by-URL option.
• Expect the calendar app to refresh on its own schedule.
• Keep the link private, since it shows the provider's bookings to anyone who has it.

Common questions