Aaniie expanded into the childcare space in 2023 with Aaniie Kids. The platform is designed to streamline the care process for agencies, families, and caregivers, Aaniie Kids makes it easier to book sitters and hire nannies. Developed with an understanding of the industry from on-demand, temp, and corporate backup care to permanent placements, Aaniie Kids offers a solution for managing business operations. Featuring embedded tools such as an Applicant Tracking…
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Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace company
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Acuity Scheduling is an appointment management platform developed by the company of the same name in New York and acquired by Squarespace in 2019.
Although the Aaniie Kids team customized some of the system for our use and continues to do so, the team is very hard to work with. In fact, in an early meeting, the CEO stated, "we listen to our users and innovate every day." My experience has been exactly the opposite. When we provide user feedback, we are told that it can't be accomplished.
I think any business can benefit from Acuity Scheduling. In my experience, however, and maybe I just haven’t found the correct settings yet, it’s been difficult to manage 4 business schedules with multiple employees and varying hours that change day-to-day and week-to-week. So I definitely would recommend it to more simple business models with set hours, as it seems like it would have all the functions one might need. I still would recommend to more complex businesses like mine as well, but also include discussion of some of the potential drawbacks.
Clicking on the link opens up my calendar, which has an uncluttered look, making it easy for my prospects and clients to review their options and make their choice.
I am able to customize my schedule, the types of appointments I want to offer, and even decide how many appointments I want in a day. There are so many details that I can customize.
I can customize how my calendar and emails look for my prospects and clients so that I come across professional and coordinated. I want the look of my business, website, etc. to have a polished, cohesive, and interesting presence.
I love that there is a workshop/class/series option for my workshops. My attendees reserve their place and pay upfront. I can duplicate these events or add future dates. It's wonderful. This saves us a lot of time and is so convenient.
I haven't had any trouble with my scheduler. It works flawlessly, so I don't have to take time out of my day to fix, troubleshoot or call customer service.
I love that I can add questions for my prospects to answer right away before booking a call. This means 3 fewer steps for me. 1. They answer these questions without an email from me. 2. They make their reservation and get a follow-up email, right away. 3. I customized the follow-up email with more details and actions to take to prepare for our call.
The scheduling dashboard is a cluttered mess and not efficient to match a family to a caregiver.
What is called reports are actually data exports without the ability to filter
Reports that pull the same data don't have the same numbers so nothing matches making it very challenging to run a business and hold employees accountable to KPI's.
The user interface of the mobile app is hard to understand and often doesn't permit caregivers to punch in and out of a shift.
The platform causes our email to be marked as spam.
Acuity Scheduling has been very reliable. If you don't believe me, check out their status page here. They do a pretty decent job maintaining their app. To be fair, it's a pretty simple tool so they shouldn't run into too many hiccups given it doesn't feature near as many options as other applications on the market run.
We are using the system, so I cannot give it a 1, but boy is it a challenge to accomplish a task. What took a click or two to accomplish a task in our previous system is now 4-6 clicks and necessary to open multiple tabs.
It is very easy to use once you get to know the program but with years of working with the program I am still finding new things that I had wished I knew about earlier. I feel like aspects of the website become hidden that would help productivity a lot if I knew they existed beforehand.
Every time I had a question on how to do something or had any issues with Acuity Scheduling, mainly in the very beginning, when I was learning the platform, customer service was excellent. They were prompt to respond, friendly, and very helpful until I had the right solution.
In the case of Schedulicity, the system was awesome (very easy to set up and had some nice features) but did not offer the functionality and flexibility that AcuityScheduling does. In the case of SimplyBook.me, they offer lots of functionality but the interface is extremely complex and you pay a la carte for features so you're going to pay exponentially more for the same set of features as compared to AcuityScheduling. Their customer service was also lacking, in my opinion.
Since the rollout we've become less efficient, thus causing the need for additional headcount to accomplish tasks previously handled with technology.
Our main focus has been drawn away from growing the business and towards purchasing other systems to supplement the missing components that we were told existed within the system, increasing our overall tech expenses.
Using disparate systems is not only time consuming, but riddled with bad data.
