A client books, answers six questions on the way through, and the answers are sitting in the appointment when the calendar opens on Monday. That part works. The part that starts to hurt is everything after it. Which of the six answers changes what happens at the appointment, who is supposed to write back about the document that did not upload, and where that reply is recorded once it has been sent.
Acuity Scheduling documents its intake forms in unusual detail, including the limits. Reading those limits before designing a form is worth an hour, because several of them only become visible once a form is live and attached to eleven appointment types.
Where the form sits in the booking flow
By default a client supplies a name, a phone number, and an email address. Custom forms are built on the Intake Form Question page, where each form gets a name and a description. Both appear immediately before the custom questions on the client scheduling page, and the documentation suggests leaving them blank when the custom questions should read as a continuation of the default ones rather than as a separate block.
The attachment point is the appointment type. A Show this form when scheduling section holds a checkbox per appointment type, and the form appears only for the types that are checked. Clients fill the form in during booking, immediately after the name, email, and phone fields.
That sequencing has a consequence that is easy to miss when the form is being designed in isolation. The form is a section of a booking, not a page of its own. No booking means no submission. Anyone who wants to ask a question, request a quote, or send a document without occupying a slot on the calendar has nowhere to do it, because the form does not exist outside the appointment that carries it.
The same boundary shows up in the commerce features. Acuity states plainly that clients cannot complete intake forms when buying packages, gift certificates, or subscriptions. The only thing available at that point is a terms agreement, enabled by checking Require clients to agree to your terms before placing an order in the Packages, gifts and subscriptions panel.
When staff book on a client's behalf, the form can be completed for them in the Forms, codes and notes section, or the responses can be requested after the fact.
Which plan the forms need
Custom client forms are listed on the entry plan, so no upgrade is required to ask questions at booking. Acuity's pricing page currently shows Starter at $20 per month billed monthly or $16 billed annually with one calendar for scheduling, Standard at $34 monthly or $27 annually with up to 6 calendars, and Premium at $61 monthly or $49 annually with up to 36 calendars. What the higher tiers add that touches forms is narrower than it looks: removing the Powered by Acuity branding, signing a business associate agreement for HIPAA, and custom API and CSS access all sit on Premium. The number of calendars is about staff and locations rather than about the forms themselves.
What you can actually ask
The field types available when building a form are specific, and the list is short enough to hold in mind:
- Textbox, in small, medium, or large. The size is guidance on expected length rather than a cap: the documentation notes clients can always enter more text if needed.
- Drop down list, with options separated by commas.
- Checkbox, a single box to tick or leave blank.
- Checkbox list, a set of options, again comma separated.
- Yes/no choice, which limits the answer to one of two values.
- File upload, for one image, document, or other file of up to 5 MB. Collecting several files means adding several upload questions.
- Address, which can also serve as the appointment location for in-home services.
There is no documented limit on how many questions a single form can hold. The question text itself is capped at 255 characters including spaces. Each question can be marked required, and questions can be dragged into whatever order makes sense.
One detail causes real confusion the first time it is hit. Because choices are comma separated, any value that contains a comma needs the comma escaped with a backslash. Mailing addresses are the usual case: entering 8 Clarkson St.\, New York\, NY 10014, 311 SW Washington St.\, Portland\, OR 97204 produces two choices rather than six. Clickable links in a form description or question work only when the address starts with http://, and a form marked for internal use only cannot carry a link at all.
Varying the questions without branching
A physiotherapy first visit and a follow up do not need the same questions, and the documented way to handle that is to build a separate form and attach it to a separate appointment type. The help documentation describes no branching on answers, which means every question on an attached form is shown to everyone booking that type.
The same pattern answers the question people ask most often about new clients. To show a form to first time clients only, create an appointment type specifically for new clients and attach the form to that type. It works, and it has a side effect worth pricing in: the appointment type list is also the menu clients choose from, so every variation added for the sake of the form adds a public choice. Three services with two client states each becomes six lines on the scheduling page.
Internal forms and SOAP notes sit on the other side of the same system. They are attached to appointments in the same way and are never visible to clients, which makes them the documented place for staff notes, health assessments, and referral tracking. One internal form attached to every appointment type, asking how the client found the business, produces a single report of referral sources without the client ever seeing the question.
Where the answers live after the booking
Answers appear time and date stamped in the appointment details, and in the internal appointment confirmation email that staff receive. Opening them later goes through the client rather than the form: Clients panel, Client List, the client's name, then the appointment, with the answers near the bottom of the appointment details.
Repeat clients behave in a way worth knowing about before anyone concludes that data has been lost. If a client filled the form in previously, those original answers show in the appointment details until the form is submitted again. When it is submitted again with some fields left blank, the earlier answers stay and are labelled Previously Answered.
Answers can be changed from both sides. Clients can edit their responses once scheduling limits allow it, using Change/Cancel Appointment in the confirmation email and then Edit Info, or an Edit Forms button added to confirmation and reminder templates. Staff edit from the Calendar page by opening the appointment, clicking Edit, and scrolling to the form answers.
Getting answers out in bulk works two ways. An appointment export offers a choice of which intake forms to include, and selecting a form narrows the export to appointments that have it attached. The Intake Forms report lists all answers to one particular question, which is the fast way to read a single field across hundreds of bookings.
The caveat here is the one to write down. Deleting a question or a whole form keeps past answers in the appointment details, so nothing disappears from the record. Those answers are no longer included in appointment exports or reports. A field that gets retired mid season is therefore still readable one booking at a time and no longer readable in aggregate.
The gap the appointment record leaves
Everything above is about capture. The questions that make a busy inbox unpleasant are about what happens next, and they sit outside what an appointment record models.
| Question | In the appointment record | In a form tool with response management |
|---|---|---|
| Where the answers live | Appointment details, per booking | A response row, per submission |
| Who is handling it | Not recorded. The calendar owns the slot | An owner per response |
| How far along it is | The appointment's own state: scheduled, canceled, rescheduled | A status the team defines |
| Submitting without booking | Not available. The form rides on an appointment | A form with its own address |
| Replying to a person | Automated templates, then a mail client | Reply from the response itself |
| Per answer branching | Not described in the documentation | Varies by product |
Automated email does a real amount of work here. Tags insert specific form answers into confirmation and follow up emails, %formslink% gives the client a link to edit their forms, and a PDF copy of the completed form can be attached to confirmations to create a time stamped record. What none of that covers is the reply that is not automated. The message asking for a legible copy of the second page gets written in a mail client, which is the one place nobody else on the team can see it. Two people reading the same calendar cannot tell whether that message was sent.
Status is the other half. An appointment is scheduled, canceled, or rescheduled, and those are the states it has. "Waiting on the insurance card" is not one of them, so it lives in a colour on a calendar, a note in a shared document, or somebody's memory. Teams that handle this well usually end up tracking the request somewhere else and treating the appointment as one event inside it, which is the same shape described on this use cases page for recruitment and programme applications.
Three constraints to check before designing the form
Accounts with HIPAA enabled behave differently in two specific ways, both of which change form design. Email notifications sent to the account holder will not include client form answers, so answers have to be read in the appointment rather than skimmed in an inbox. File uploads are accepted only from a local computer or device, which rules out pulling a document straight from Google Docs or a similar service.
The Airbnb integration does not support appointment types that have intake forms assigned. If bookings arrive through that channel, questions for those services have to be asked another way.
Answers collected in a Squarespace form block or any third party form are not included in the appointment details. Linking to an outside form from the confirmation page or the initial confirmation email is supported and reasonable, but the result is two records of the same client that nothing joins for you.
What to change first
Write down the three questions asked most often in follow up email after a booking, and check whether each one is a field, a branch, or a reply. Fields belong on the intake form attached to that appointment type. Branches belong in a second appointment type. Replies are the ones that do not fit at all, and if there are more than a handful of those each week, the thing to change is where the request lives rather than how the form is worded. A form tool that keeps an owner and a status on every response solves the third case, and what that looks like in practice takes a couple of minutes to check before committing to a rebuild with Halict.
Q1. How many questions can one Acuity intake form hold?
Acuity's documentation states there is no limit to the number of questions that can be added per form. Each question's text is capped at 255 characters including spaces. Long forms are limited in practice by how many questions a client will answer during booking rather than by the product.
Q2. Can an intake form show different questions depending on an earlier answer?
The help documentation does not describe branching or conditional logic on intake forms. The documented way to vary questions is to build separate forms and attach each to a different appointment type, which also means each variation appears as its own service on the scheduling page.
Q3. How large a file can a client upload through an intake form?
Each file upload question accepts one image, document, or other file of up to 5 MB. Collecting several documents means adding several upload questions to the form. On accounts with HIPAA enabled, uploads are accepted only from a local computer or device.
Q4. What happens to the answers if a question is deleted?
Answers already collected stay in the appointment details for past bookings, so nothing is lost from the individual record. Those answers are no longer included in appointment exports or in reports, so a field retired partway through a season can no longer be read in aggregate. Export what is needed before deleting anything.
Q5. Can someone submit an intake form without booking an appointment?
No. Intake forms are attached to appointment types and are completed during booking, and they are not available when buying packages, gift certificates, or subscriptions. A general enquiry, a document handover, or a quote request needs a form that exists independently of the calendar.