We wanted to share the good news that OpenCal has been acquired and is now part of Groupon!

We’re excited by this opportunity to bring our online appointment booking platform to a broad set of merchants and consumers world-wide. Today we announced an exciting next step, the latest version of our product available as “Groupon Scheduler“.

Our existing OpenCal product will continue to operate for current users until further notice and we anticipate that we’ll be able to offer additional capabilities in the future now that we have the support of Groupon behind us. We’re very grateful for your support and look forward to continuing to advance online booking.

Today we are announcing full compliance with HIPAA and that OpenCal can be used as an online appointment scheduling tool for healthcare providers. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (“HIPAA”) act is a privacy and security standard that any organization which stores health information must comply with.

More information can be found in our HIPAA Compliance Statement.

We’re excited to make a highly requested feature available to all our users: you can now request PayPal instant payments when clients book an appointment with you!

Simply enable PayPal payments under your Appointment Settings, enter your PayPal email address, and set your cost and payment preference under each service you would like to receive payments for.

More information on this new feature is available in our support article: How do I request payment for appointment bookings?

Today we’re happy to announce OpenCal is fully secure end-to-end. Both the business side of the application and the client side (mini-website and booking steps) now go through a secure 256-bit encrypted SSL connection for an added layer of protection. If you are in a public WiFi network, this will protect your communications and client records from potential prying eyes. It will also give your clients an added sense of confidence when booking sensitive appointments with you. This feature will be turned on automatically for all accounts.

Stay tuned for another exciting feature coming next month!

We’re excited to be rolling out a much-requested feature: customizable service start times!

Up until now, OpenCal has automatically calculated availability based on schedule openings, service length, and padding time. This works great in most cases, but what if you want to manually choose specific times for a service to be available? That’s where custom service start times come in!

To access this new feature, simply navigate to the service for which would you’d like to define custom start times, select “Enable custom start times”, and add your start times.

We hope you find this newfound flexibility useful. Thanks for using OpenCal!