This is a process that is handled entirely outside of Cliniko, and is considered a workaround. This guide will offer some tips, but we cannot guarantee that they will work for everyone. We encourage you to do your own research (in addition to reviewing this guide) if you're looking for information on how to automatically forward booking notifcations to a different address.
Practitioners can recieve email notifications about new online bookings, bookings made by other staff members, or cancellations—but these notifications can only be sent to practitioners. It's not currently possible to send them to a central administrative or reception email address (though we'll let you know if this changes!), but this can be circumvented by setting up email forwarding. 📨
In this guide, we'll offer some tips that may help when it comes to getting these notifications to a different email address—automatically. Please note that these are just suggestions, and this process cannot be managed within Cliniko. It must be managed within the settings of your email program, and Cliniko has no control over these settings.
Automatically forward booking notifications to a different email address
Let's say that a practitioner named Sally Smith (sally@example.com) wants all of her booking notifications to be forwarded to her receptionist (reception@example.com). Sally could do this manually by clicking the forward button on every single notification she recieves, but that would be a lot of work! Instead, Sally can go into her email settings and automate this so that all notification emails from Cliniko are sent to her receptionist from this point on.
Each email "provider" (such as Gmail, Outlook, etc.) is different, and this means that there will be different "rules" for setting up automatic forwarding. While we will share links to a few relevant email forwarding guides, please note that the forwarding process is not managed by Cliniko, and we cannot set it up for you—only the owner of the email address who wants to forward their notifications can do this.
Below are some commonly used email providers and their own instructions for how to set up email forwarding:
Gmail: "Automatically forward Gmail messages to another account" (note that you'll want to pay attention to the section called "Only forward certain kinds of messages")
Outlook: "Use rules to automatically forward messages" (note that you do not want to "Apply to all messages", as this article says, but will want to use rules for certain types of messages)
Again, please note that Cliniko cannot control how forwarding rules in different email providers work, and we can't guarantee that once they are set up, they will work. We suggest that you research how to properly use filters to forward the correct emails from your personal inbox to the other address you'd like them to go to.
If you do set up email forwarding, the communications log within Cliniko will still indicate the original address the message was sent to—we cannot track where a message is forwarded after it hits a practitioner's inbox.
Tips for selecting rules and filters for email forwarding
When setting up forwarding rules, you'll want to be sure that you forward only certain messages—in this case, booking notifications. Presumably, you don't want to send all of your incoming emails to someone else!
When it comes to forwarding only booking notifications from Cliniko, there are a few things that will help to make it easier. Below, take a look at this example "new online booking" email:
There are a couple things we can take away from this that will help when it comes to filtering out these emails, and forwarding them to another address! Specifically:
The "from" address, which is
notifications@cliniko.com.The subject line, which is "New online booking".
Both of these things are unique to the email that goes out for a new online booking, and can therefore be used when setting up filters. (So, for example, any emails that might have the subject line called "New online booking" could be included in the filter, or any that come from notifications@cliniko.com).
We do hope that one day booking notications to a central admin address can be a feature of Cliniko, but until that time comes, this workaround will be the best option. If you had any questions, our support team is here to help!