Appointments

Your appointments live on the Schedule page. There are four ways to get them into Tellem — use any combination.

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Bring in your jobs

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Google Calendar

On Integrations, click Connect Google Calendar and authorize. Tellem reads your events and turns them into appointments. It’s read-only — Tellem never changes your calendar. Plain calendar events often don’t include a customer phone number or precise address, so some will land in Needs attention until you add those.

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Jobber

On Integrations, click Connect Jobber and authorize. Tellem imports your scheduled jobs and their assigned technicians, including the service address. Read-only — nothing is written back to Jobber. Re-importing refreshes existing jobs instead of creating duplicates.

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Import a CSV (Smart Importer)

On the Schedule page, choose Import from CSV and upload a spreadsheet export. Tellem suggests how your columns map to its fields (customer, email, time, address…); review and adjust the mapping, then confirm. Great for a backlog or a system Tellem doesn’t connect to directly.

Imported numbers arrive un-texted. You can map a phone column now — Tellem just won’t text any of those numbers right away. Each one lands as a “notice pending” number: not consent, just a placeholder that keeps them from being texted by mistake. To start texting a customer you imported, open their appointment and confirm the continuing-updates notice (see below) the next time you’re in touch with them.

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Add by hand

On the Schedule page, open a day and choose + Add to this day. Enter the customer, time, address, and worker. No integration required. As you type the address, Tellem suggests matching ones — pick the one you mean from the list. That’s what pins the job on the map, and the save button stays greyed out until you do, so an address can’t be saved as text with no location. If none of the suggestions is right, open Advanced — coordinates and paste the latitude and longitude from a map instead.

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Text-message consent

Whenever you enter a phone number Tellem hasn’t texted for you before, you’ll be asked to confirm one thing while you’re booking the job. There’s no script to read and no yes/no question to ask — just tell the customer why you’re texting them before you ask for their number. Something like “Can I get a number for appointment text updates?” is enough. Once you’ve said that, the customer handing you their number is the consent — tick the box to confirm you said it, and Tellem sends that customer a short enrollment confirmation so they have a receipt and a working STOP before any appointment texts start. You only do this once per customer. Consent carries over to all their future appointments with you, so when you book them again you’ll see “Text updates already authorized” with the date it happened — nothing to tick, and no second confirmation is sent. It stays that way until the customer replies STOP, which suppresses their texts immediately and permanently. Adding a phone number to an appointment that didn’t have one asks the same question, for the same reason: that’s the first time Tellem would be texting that number. Without consent on file, Tellem won’t send — so if you skip it, the appointment saves but the customer never hears anything.

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Numbers that were already on file

A number can also arrive on an appointment with no consent captured yet — most often a phone number you imported (see the CSV callout above). Tellem calls this “notice pending.” It’s not a defect: the appointment saves normally and nothing is blocked. It just means the customer hasn’t been told yet that Tellem will be texting them. To clear it, open the appointment the next time you’re in touch with that customer and tell them one sentence — something like “We’ll text you appointment updates at this number going forward, and you can stop them anytime.” — then tick the box that appears. That’s the moment the number becomes textable; Tellem sends the enrollment confirmation right after, same as a brand-new number.

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Assigning work to a technician

Open a day on the Schedule, tick the checkboxes next to one or more appointments, choose a worker, and assign. You can assign a single job or a whole batch at once, and reassign or unassign the same way. (A worker has to be sharing location for live ETA — see Field workers.)

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If nobody is assigned

If a job’s start time arrives and no technician has been assigned, Tellem warns your business — once on the morning of the job, and again about two hours before it starts. The customer isn’t affected; they still get their usual appointment messages. Once you assign a worker, the alerts stop. If you reschedule an unassigned job, it gets fresh alerts on its new date/time. This runs automatically for every account — there’s no trigger to turn on. What you can choose is which channel(s) reach you: email, text, or both, from the Alerts to your business card on the Account page. A text needs a cell number on file (see Business alerts for the full picture, including what happens if you turn on texting without one).

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Closing out a job

Open a day on the Schedule and click an appointment to expand it. Alongside Edit and Cancel appointment you’ll find Mark complete — use it when the work is done. Marking a job complete stops Tellem’s automatic customer messages for it: no more reminders, arrival alerts, or delay warnings. The appointment stays on the schedule with a Completed badge so you keep the history. Both Mark complete and Cancel appointment are one-way. Once an appointment is completed or cancelled it can’t be reopened, and the two buttons disappear from it — if the job comes back, book it again.

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What “ready to notify” means, and Needs attention

To notify a customer and predict arrival, an appointment needs a customer phone or email, a service address that pins on the map, and an assigned worker. Appointments missing any of these appear on the Needs attention page — fix them there before they’d otherwise notify a customer.