Connect Cliniko to an external calendar

Link your Cliniko appointments up with Google Calendar, your iPhone calendar, Outlook, and more!

Emily avatar
Written by Emily
Updated over a week ago

One of the super handy things about Cliniko is that you can connect it with another calendar tool you use on your phone or computer—such as Google Calendar, the iPhone calendar, or Outlook! 

What happens is that you will use a special URL (generated by Cliniko) to add a "subscription" in your external calendar. That calendar will then "read" your Cliniko calendar, and display your appointments!

One thing to keep in mind is that it's a one way sync—so events will be sent from Cliniko, to your external calendar, but not the other way around. So, if you update your Cliniko calendar, events will be pushed to your external calendar, but if you update your external calendar, that change will not be pushed to Cliniko.


Getting started: enabling your calendar

There will be one "main" step to follow as the first step for syncing with any calendar!

Click on My info under your name:

This will bring you to your practitioner information page. You'll want to click Edit your practitioner settings:

Then, on the next page, find where it says External calendar (not enabled):

Click the Enable external calendar button, and you'll see a really long URL come up. This is the URL you will use when it comes time to connect your Cliniko calendar to an external calendar:

Click the Copy the URL now button. We only display this URL once, so it's best to link it up with your external calendar immediately, as otherwise you won't see it again and will need to reconfigure your external calendar settings.

Please keep this URL secure, as anyone with this address can subscribe to your calendar. If you ever need to, you can disable and re-enable the external calendar and it will issue you a new URL.


Patient privacy

Giving you the tools to protect your patient's privacy is really important. You can control how your patient names will display in external calendars by heading over to Settings, and then Patient privacy

You can then choose your preferred patient name display using the dropdown menu: 

When you're happy with your settings, scroll down and click the "Save settings" button to save your preferences. 👌 

Now, on to the next step—connecting to your external calendar of choice:

While those are some of the more popular calendars, the process will be fairly similar across the board for connecting your Cliniko calendar with any external calendar!


Google Calendar

If you have a Gmail email address, then you have Google Calendar! Here's how to link your Cliniko schedule up with your Google Calendar.

The following steps assume that you have already copied your external calendar URL from your user profile in Cliniko. If you haven't done that, please do so now!

Log into Gmail. Once you're logged in, click the symbol made up of nine tiny squares in the upper-right corner of the screen. From there, click the Calendar icon:

Once you're logged in, click the little + sign on the left:

And then From URL:

Paste your Cliniko calendar URL (the one you enabled earlier) into the URL field, and then click ADD CALENDAR:

After a few moments, you will see your appointments show up:


You can now change the colour (if you want!) and the name of your imported Cliniko calendar. 

To change the colour, click the three dots to the right of the imported URL, and you can change the colour right from there. If you want to change the name, click Settings:

On the next page, delete the long URL (which is the "name" of the calendar, currently) and replace it with whatever makes sense to you:

It'll automatically save, so when you go back to your calendar, you will see it marked with the new name:

That's all you need to do! Google Calendar will now "read" your Cliniko calendar, and import appointments when you add them. If you use the Google Calendar app on your phone, that will also display your Cliniko appointments!

Google has stated that subscribed calendars added to Google Calendar may take up to 12 hours for changes to show. If you don't see your appointments show up immediately, give it some time, and check back a bit later!


The iPhone calendar

If you have an iPhone, you'll have the ability to use the calendar app (formerly called iCal) that comes with the iPhone to view any type of calendar, including your Cliniko one!

If you're on iOS 10 and below, the instructions are slightly different. In order to add your calendar link: Go to Settings → Calendar → Accounts → Add Account → Other → Add Subscribed Calendar.

The following steps assume that you have already copied your external calendar URL from your user profile in Cliniko. If you haven't done that, please do so now!

On your iPhone, find the Settings app:

Find the Calendar setting:

Then, select Accounts:

Click Add Account:

From the list of account types, select Other:

Click Add Subscribed Calendar:

Paste your Cliniko calendar URL into the Server field, and press Next:

Change the Description to something that makes sense (i.e. Cliniko) and press Save:

Now you'll see that you have your Cliniko calendar under Subscribed Calendars:

While you're here, make sure that Fetch New Data is set to Push:

If it's not on, change it so that it is:

"Push" means that your iPhone calendar will try to "read" your Cliniko appointments as soon as they are added to your Cliniko calendar—because Cliniko will "push" them in to your iPhone calendar.

Now, if you go to your iPhone calendar app, you will see your Cliniko appointments:

And that's it! 📅👌


Calendar for Mac

If you use an Apple computer, then by default, you have access to the calendar app on your Mac (formerly called iCal), and can hook your Cliniko calendar up to your computer's calendar!

The following steps assume that you have already copied your external calendar URL from your user profile in Cliniko. If you haven't done that, please do so now!

On your Mac, go to the Calendar app:

When the calendar opens, go to FileNew calendar subscription:

Paste your Cliniko calendar URL into the Calendar URL field, and press the Subscribe button:

Configure your calendar by choosing a name and setting the auto-refresh period. We recommend every hour (this means that your Mac calendar will check for any new appointments every hour). Then press the OK button:

Your Cliniko appointments will now appear in your Mac calendar under the list of other calendars!

And you're all set! 👌


Microsoft Outlook Calendar

If you use Outlook for your email, then it means you can also use the Outlook calendar to view your Cliniko appointments. Outlook has some instructions on how to do this here, and we recommend that you check them out—while we do do our best to keep this guide updated, external programs (such as Outlook) may change their processes, and we don't have a way of knowing when this happens. This means that our guide may be outdated, so we advise checking out the "official" steps from Outlook in addition to what we have here.

The following steps assume that you have already copied your external calendar URL from your user profile in Cliniko. If you haven't done that, please do so now!

Log into your Outlook account. Click the little symbol that's made up of nine tiny squares in the upper-left, and then click the Calendar icon:

Once on the calendar, click the Add calendar menu, and then From internet:

Paste your Cliniko calendar URL into the Link to the calendar field, give it a name, and press Save:

After a few moments, your appointments will show up on your Outlook calendar, and the calendar itself will be listed under Other calendars:

That's all you need to do!

The above guide is based on Outlook for Windows 10, but the process would be similar for other versions of Outlook.

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