General Preferences

The General Preferences area in your online booking page settings is where you control a small but important set of booking-flow defaults: Magnetic Booking (how OutSmart groups appointments together to reduce gaps in your day), buffer time between visits, minimum booking notice (how far ahead a patient must book before the appointment time), and the Display options — three vocabulary dropdowns plus the accent-font picker — that let you tailor the wording and look of your booking page.

Opening General Preferences

Open your online booking page in edit mode (logged in with edit access — see Edit Mode Basics if you need a refresher).
Click the Settings menu in the edit toolbar.
Open General Preferences.

Magnetic Booking

Magnetic Booking is a way of offering appointment slots to patients that groups bookings together so you don’t end up with awkward gaps between appointments. When Magnetic Booking is on, OutSmart will only offer patients slots that are directly adjacent to other events already in your calendar — so each new booking lands next to an existing one instead of scattering across the day.

How It Works

For each block of Hours of Operation:

An empty block gives patients three default slots to choose from — one at the start of the block, one in the middle, and one at the end.
As soon as one slot is booked, the next available slot offered to patients shifts to be directly adjacent to that booking — either right before it or right after.
Each Hours of Operation block is treated separately. If your day is one continuous 9 am – 5 pm block, you start with three slots. If your day is split (for example, 9 am – 12 pm and 1 pm – 5 pm), each block gets its own three starting slots, for six total.
As more bookings fill in, more slots open up directly next to them, and the day fills compactly from the existing bookings outward.

Why Use It

Magnetic Booking is designed to protect your time. Instead of a patient at 9 am, another at 1 pm, and a third at 4 pm — with two long gaps where you’re at the clinic waiting — Magnetic Booking pulls those bookings together so your active time is concentrated and your idle time is at the ends of your block, where it’s useful.

For high-volume practices, this is one of the single most impactful settings in online booking.

Turning Magnetic Booking On or Off

In General Preferences, set Enable Magnetic Booking to On or Off.

When Magnetic Booking Is Off

If Magnetic Booking is off, OutSmart uses a fixed scheduling interval instead. Slots are offered every X minutes starting from the beginning of your Hours of Operation block, regardless of where existing bookings sit. The interval defaults to a value you can set, but each event type can override it with its own interval.

Break Between Visits

A break between visits is a buffer of time after each booked appointment during which no other appointment can be booked online. This is useful if you need a few minutes between patients to write notes, sanitize the room, or simply breathe.

The General Preferences value sets the default for all event types.
An individual event type can override this default with its own buffer in the Event Type editor. For example, a 60-minute initial consultation might need a 15-minute buffer while a 15-minute follow-up might need none.

Set the value in minutes.

Minimum Booking Notice

The minimum booking notice is how far in advance a patient must book an appointment. For example, if it’s set to 24 hours, a patient looking at your booking page at 10 am today can only book appointments after 10 am tomorrow.

The General Preferences value sets the default for all event types.
An individual event type can override this default with its own minimum notice in the Event Type editor.

Set the value in hours.

Display — Vocabulary Customization

The Display section of General Preferences has three dropdowns that let you swap the default words patient, clinic, and practitioner for the term your practice actually uses. The change flows through the entire booking page — headings, prompts, form labels, summary text, the cancellation-policy default copy, and the service-card labels all use your chosen word automatically.

Setting	Default	Available options
Patient term	Patient	Patient, Client, Guest, Member, Visitor
Clinic term	Clinic	Clinic, Practice, Office, Studio, Gym, Centre, Class, Spa
Practitioner term	Practitioner	Practitioner, Coach, Counsellor, Therapist, Guide, Instructor, Mediator, Provider, Trainer, Specialist, Teacher

Pick the term from the dropdown and save. Customer-facing pages reflect the new wording on the next page load.

The vocabulary swap is per-office and per-practitioner. Practitioners with their own practitioner-priority booking page can pick different words from the office default — useful when a single clinic hosts both a “patient” practice and a “client” practice that need different language on each booking page.

The dropdowns offer a fixed list of common alternatives — they’re not free-form. The fixed list is intentional: every option has been tested across the dozens of places the word appears (form labels, summaries, policy text, restriction pills) so the substitution stays consistent everywhere. If you’d like a word that’s not in the list, contact us at contact.outsmartemr.com so we can evaluate adding it to the whitelist.

Substitution coverage

The chosen word substitutes into:

Customer-facing prompts — “Are you a new or returning patient?”, “Is this for you or someone else you’re booking for?”
Form headings and field labels at the patient-information step
Confirmation summary mini-labels
Waitlist labels and fallback text
Service-card restriction pills — “New patients only” / “Returning patients only” become “New clients only” / “New members only” depending on your choice
The default cancellation-policy text and the “no cancellation” message — admin-saved defaults containing literal patients / the clinic / the practitioner are rewritten at render to match your term

A few internal-product names stay as-is regardless of the dropdown — Patient Portal and Smart Forms, for instance, are product names that don’t get translated.

Display — Accent Font (Flair Font)

The Accent Font picker controls the font used for the accent headings on your booking page — the welcome line, the section flairs, and any styled accents that aren’t body text. The dropdown shows each font rendered in its own typeface, so you can preview the look before committing.

Available fonts

Style	Fonts
Handwriting / casual	Edu SA Beginner (default), Caveat, Kalam, Patrick Hand, Shadows Into Light, Architects Daughter
Polished scripts	Dancing Script, Sacramento, Pacifico
Editorial serifs	Playfair Display, Lora
Standard sans	Inter (matches body text — for clinics that want no flair contrast)

Picking a font

Open General Preferences.
In the Display section, open the Accent Font dropdown.
Hover or click through the options — each one renders in its own face.
A preview text below the dropdown updates instantly when you change the selection.
Save when you’ve picked the one you want. The customer-facing booking page reflects the new font on the next page load.

Only the font you’ve picked is loaded on the customer-facing page, so swapping fonts has no impact on page load speed for patients. The first time you open the Accent Font dropdown as an admin, all twelve fonts preload so the preview is flash-free — patients never download more than the one font you chose.

Who Can Change These Settings

You need edit access to the online booking page to change General Preferences. That includes:

The office owner
Admin staff at the office
A practitioner on their own practitioner-priority booking page (their personal page only)

How These Settings Relate to Event Types

Two of these three settings — break between visits, and minimum booking notice — are defaults that individual event types can override.

Magnetic Booking applies to all event types. No override.
Break Between Visits can be overridden per event type.
Minimum Booking Notice can be overridden per event type.

If an event type has its own value, that value wins for that event type. If the event type doesn’t have its own value, the General Preferences default applies.

See Creating Event Types for how to set the per-event-type values.

Setting Up Your Hours of Operation — without Hours of Operation, none of these settings has anything to apply to
Creating Event Types — for per-event-type overrides of buffer and minimum notice
Cancellation Policy — the other major behavior-control setting in the V2 booking page
Settings Overview — the full list of booking-page settings