Perhaps someone has set up a Calendly for you, but you need to know what to do beyond rocking up to appointments. This article is for you. Perhaps you’ve set up a Calendly for an adviser you support or your team and need them to manage their own Outlook calendars. Well, consider this article a shareable resource.
In this article, we’ll be covering:
- Manage the permanent in Calendly, manage the rest in Outlook
- Make a habit of booking out time in your calendar
- Use the link with cancellations and reschedules
- Tailor your availability
- Keep your process consistent
- Other quick tips
- If you’re overwhelmed
Once you get to the end, you should have a concise list of all the things you need to manage your calendar effectively.
Manage the permanent in Calendly, manage the rest in Outlook
Calendly allows you to set your availability, your buffer between appointments, and much more.
The availability tool is great for this. You might never want an appointment after 4PM so you can close out file notes for the day (yes, that might be strangely optimistic), or you might never want an appointment on a Monday morning due to a permanent team meeting.
Not all things are permanent though, even if they are usual. For example:
- You might only be able to take appointments before 9:30 when you must drop off kids at school, but that still leaves about a dozen weeks a year where you can.
- You might have a recurring meeting that only ends up being required 2/3 of the time.
- You might always meet with your team lead at the start of every Wednesday, but down the track that might move to a different time slot which would make you available.
In these cases, managing your availability by booking it in your Outlook calendar, rather than setting it directly in Outlook, would be ideal.
Make a habit of booking out time in your calendar
Once set up, Calendly will sync to your Outlook (or other) calendar. Within the parameters used when setting it up, it’ll check against your Outlook to see if you’re available.
This means it’s important to keep your Outlook up to date even for things you might not have normally bothered with. If you have a dentist appointment booked, you need to update your Outlook calendar. Alternatively, if you need to leave early to beat traffic so you can make a 6PM event, you need to book it.
If your phone is already connected to the same calendar, that makes this easy. Just add it from your phone, which will speak to your Outlook, which Calendly will then reference.
Some key ones you might not have bothered to block out in your calendar normally, but should:
- Transit
- Lunch
- File notes or action items
- Read up on overnight market movements or urgent emails
Use the link with cancellations and reschedules
One of the biggest wins from Calendly can be reduced instances of time-wasting reschedules and cancellations of client meetings, simply due to the automated reminder email and SMS systems.
That said, these things will nonetheless happen. Whilst clients can click a link in their invite to reschedule, most will do so by phone or email. When this happens, it is important you use the link in the meeting invitation instead of clicking and dragging the meeting around in Outlook, which won’t notify Calendly of the change.
Tailor your availability
Depending on your business needs, you can tailor your availability based on the appointment type.
Some examples can include:
- Having a wider range of times available for New Business clients.
- Having a separate booking page you might share with a qualified lead, rather than one booked through a standard publicly visible website button.
- Having a separate booking link for BDM appointments which might have a narrower time available.
Keep your process consistent
When working with clients on process rebuilds, we’re always keen to ensure the client experience is consistent every time, and the process is as consistent as possible.
To achieve this, we always recommend having ‘Internally booked’ versions of each appointment.
These links would not be visible to the public, but are available for staff to use as if they were the client when booking appointments scheduled by phone or email. As these are booked by a team member, they differ to the self-serve versions in the following ways:
- No buffer between appointments.
- Longest fathomable availability ranges (if the adviser would ever consider a 7AM appointment, or a 6PM appointment, those times are available).
- No dedicated booking page on your website or redirections, as you don’t need them. The native Calendly links are enough.
This would also be the method used if a meeting was booked by an adviser on the road and subsequently entered into the calendar by the support team.
In doing so, the clients receive a consistent experience regardless of the method used and the team can automate the confirmations and reminders in less time than it would’ve taken to do it manually.
Other quick tips
There’s a long list of things we do when micromanaging appointments to get the best out of your systems. Whilst they aren’t all required, if you’re even a little bit like us you’ll value some of the little things to maximise your convenience.
Managing all day appointments
All-day appointments booked through Outlook show as ‘Free’ by default, which is great for tracking birthdays but annoying if it’s because you’re away at a conference. By default, Calendly understandably thinks ‘Free’ means you’re available. As such, you need to either update your Outlook defaults here or keep on top of checking these things regularly.
Book internal movable appointments as ‘Tentative’
If you make a business rule that movable appointments or indeed your own reserved time is ‘Tentative’, it keeps this time free for clients to self-serve. This works great for keeping those things you’d be happy to shuffle around from getting between you and a new business meeting.
Have an out-of-hours timeslot if you’re happy to do so
One downside of having a self-serve process is that prospects and clients might not realise you’re happy to be a bit flexible. If you’re happy to do so, you might want to consider leaving scope for a late Thursday appointment for clients who struggle to get away from work, and you would’ve normally accommodated them if they’d asked. Just don’t forget that you’ll need to mark this as busy too if you’re not going to be available one day.
Choice-driven process, not mandated
One of the biggest fears we see stems from poor use of tools like Calendly, not from the tools themselves. Generally speaking, when you’re offering a client the opportunity to self-serve in a professional services context it should be a choice, not a requirement. In a financial advice review context specifically, it should absolutely exist as part of a process that includes manual (if automatically prompted) follow-up with a phone call if one isn’t booked to ensure services promised are provided.
If you’re overwhelmed
Rolling out self-service tools can be a great way to support automation for clients where they choose to take it up. If you’d like to learn more about how we might be able to help you set this up (and more), click the ‘Book a chat’ button at the bottom right of this page.
If you have a question, another tip we haven’t thought of, or even a nightmare scheduling tale, we’d love to hear it via our contact form.
Outlook and Calendly FAQs
When you create an event in Outlook, it is assigned a status that indicates your availability to others. The options include Free, Tentative, Busy, and Out of Office. By default, all-day events in Outlook, such as a conference day, a public holiday marker, or a birthday reminder, are set to Free. This is intentional for low-stakes entries, where you want the event visible but do not want to block your calendar for scheduling.
The problem is that Calendly reads your Outlook calendar to determine when you are available for bookings, and it interprets Free as available. So, if you have marked yourself as away at a two-day industry conference using an all-day event that defaults to Free, Calendly will continue to offer your time to clients throughout that period. To prevent this, either change the all-day event status to Out of Office or Busy in Outlook before you leave or update your Outlook default so that new all-day events are created as Busy. You can change the default in Outlook’s calendar settings under “Default status for new events.”
A buffer is a period of time that Calendly automatically reserves before or after a booked appointment, during which no further bookings can be made. In practice, a 15-minute buffer after a one-hour client meeting means that if a client books at 10:00 am, the next available slot Calendly will offer begins at 11:15 am rather than 11:00 am. This built-in gap gives you time to write file notes, action any immediate follow-ups, collect your thoughts, or simply take a break before the next appointment.
You can configure buffers separately for each event type in Calendly, which means you can set a longer buffer after a complex review meeting than after a short initial call. The article’s recommendation that “internally booked” versions of each appointment type have no buffer reflects the logic that when a staff member manually schedules a meeting, they can make an informed judgment about spacing rather than relying on an automated rule. For client-facing, self-serve booking pages, buffers are a practical way to protect your day without manually managing them.
When a booking is made through Calendly, it creates a linked event in your Outlook calendar that is connected back to Calendly’s system. If you or a team member drags that event to a new time directly in Outlook, the movement is reflected in your Outlook calendar, but Calendly is not notified. This means Calendly’s records still show the original time, the client’s confirmation email and reminders will reference the wrong time, and the original time slot may no longer appear as busy in Calendly, potentially allowing a second booking to land there.
The correct process is to use the reschedule link within the original Calendly confirmation email, which updates both systems simultaneously and sends the client a new confirmation with the correct details. If you receive a reschedule request by phone, the team member handling it should locate the original booking in Calendly, open it, and use the reschedule option from there rather than touching Outlook directly. Building this into your team’s standard operating procedure from the start is far easier than trying to retrofit the habit later.
In Calendly, each event type has its own unique URL that can be shared independently of your public booking page. To create a link intended only for a specific referral partner or pre-qualified lead, create a new event type in Calendly with the settings you want, such as wider availability, no intake questions, or a longer meeting duration, and simply do not embed or link to it anywhere on your public website. Share the URL directly with the relevant partner via email or include it on a referral partner landing page that is not indexed by search engines.
This approach gives you a dedicated, tailored experience for those relationships without exposing them to general website visitors. If you want to go further, you can duplicate an existing event type as your starting point, adjust the name, availability windows, and any questions, and have the new link ready in a few minutes. Calendly’s paid plans also let you customise the booking page’s appearance, so you can adjust the heading or welcome message to match the specific context in which the link will be used.
The article makes an important point: self-service booking tools should complement a manual follow-up process, not replace it, particularly for annual review meetings, where providing that service is a licensee and regulatory obligation. If a client does not self-book after an automated prompt and you subsequently follow up by phone or email, document that contact in your CRM or practice management system with the date, method, and outcome. If the client declines a review or cannot be reached after reasonable attempts, this should also be recorded.
This matters because ASIC’s guidance on ongoing fee arrangements requires advice firms to demonstrate that the services promised under a fee arrangement have been delivered or genuinely offered. A record showing that Calendly sent an automated prompt followed by a manual follow-up call provides a clear evidence trail if your processes are ever reviewed. Exactly how you document this will depend on your CRM and your licensee’s requirements, but a consistent, dated note for each client is the minimum standard. This article does not constitute legal or compliance advice, and you should seek your own guidance on your specific obligations.
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