Software of Excellence Blog

How to Optimise Your Diary in EXACT

Published: 18 March 2025

Your appointment book isn't just a diary – it's the backbone of your practice. A well-organised appointment book reduces stress, improves efficiency, and helps you focus on what truly matters: your patients. With EXACT’s powerful features, you can optimise your appointment book to streamline your workflow and take full control of your day.

Keeping your appointment book clear with blocks

Whether you've booked a meeting, you're on the school run, or you have an appointment yourself, blocks are the perfect tool to prevent bookings where you don’t want them.

Using blocks allows you to schedule time in your appointment book, ensuring that everyone - including online booking - knows when you're unavailable.

⛔ Create blocks for individual or multiple providers at once
⛔ Set recurring or one-off blocks
⛔ Use visual aids and warning prompts to prevent appointment bookings
⛔ Add a block colour for easy identification

Learn how to create, edit and delete blocks in the EXACT help centre.

💡 Tip: You can pre-set the time and length of a block by right-clicking, holding your mouse button down, and dragging your cursor. This works for clinics and appointments too!

Using clinics to structure your day

Clinics allow you to dedicate specific time slots for certain appointment types or patient groups. Often used to allocate time when clinicians provide particular treatments or see specific payor groups, clinics help keep your diary structured and efficient.

✅ Create repeating and one-off clinics
✅ Set clinics for groups of patients or treatment categories
✅ Assign colours for each clinic
✅ Add clinics for individual or multiple providers
✅ Link online booking reasons to clinics to control bookings.

Find out how to create, edit and delete clinics in the EXACT help centre.

💡 Tip: If you're struggling to see the hashed lines highlighting clinics, you can adjust them. Navigate to Configure → Appointment Book → Appearance Options to alter the line width.

Customising your appointment book for better visibility

Configuring your appointment book to suit your workflow can make a huge difference. EXACT allows you to customise colours, layouts, and views to ensure key information stands out.

You can set appointments to display by provider, room, category, or payor colour, helping you organise your schedule at a glance.

Explore more colour options the EXACT help centre.

💡 Tip: You can set your day and week views to display different colour settings, allowing you to quickly view different appointment information at the same time.

As well as colours, you might find it useful to adjust your working spaces;

⚙️ Hover your mouse on the edge of any area in your appointment book until your cursor changes to the adjust icon, then click and drag to alter the size of the area.
⚙️ Change the days/weeks/months options in the week view by altering the size of the week view area.

Organising your provider columns for maximum efficiency

Optimising your provider columns by removing old ones, adding new ones, and grouping clinicians together can increase efficiency and improve visibility.

Removing old providers from your appointment book increases column widths, making it easier to view patient and appointment details.

🖱️ Removing old provider columns creates more space for existing providers
🖱️ Group providers together to quickly view available appointment slots

Explore your appointment book column options in the EXACT help centre.