Acuity Intake Forms
Acuity lets you attach intake forms to your services. If any field on those forms is marked required, Acuity will not accept a booking without it — including a booking your Voka AI assistant is trying to make on the phone.
This page explains what that means for phone bookings, and how to set answers for the questions that do not belong in a phone conversation.
If a service has a required field your assistant cannot fill, every phone booking for that service fails — silently, from the caller's point of view. They will hear the assistant apologise and offer to take a message.
The most common cause is a required file upload. Nobody can email you a referral letter while they are on the phone, so unless you give that field an answer in advance, the booking cannot complete.
Where to find it
In your Voka AI portal:
Integrations → Acuity → Manage → Forms
You will see one card per form, showing which of your services it is attached to, and one control for each field on it.
Forms that are not attached to any service are not shown. A form nothing uses cannot block a booking, so there is nothing to configure.
How your assistant handles a form
When a caller books a service that has an intake form, your assistant works down the required fields one at a time, in conversation — it asks a question, waits for the answer, then asks the next. It does not read the list out or announce how many there are.
Anything you answer on this screen is not asked. Your assistant fills it in silently at booking time and moves on.
So the screen answers one question per field: should a caller be asked this, or should we answer it on their behalf every time?
Choosing what to answer
A useful rule: answer the fields that are about your business, and leave the fields that are about the caller.
| Leave for the caller | Answer on their behalf |
|---|---|
| Anything clinically relevant — allergies, medical history, reason for visit | Fields your assistant physically cannot collect, like file uploads |
| Anything that changes per person and affects the appointment | Internal or administrative fields that exist for your records |
| Anything you would want in the caller's own words | Fields where every phone caller would give the same answer |
Each form card shows a live count of what is still being asked, so you can see the effect of a change immediately:
Your assistant asks callers 3 questions
Terms, cancellation policies and "I understand the deposit is non-refundable" are usually required fields. You can answer them here, and your assistant will then record every caller as having agreed.
Think about whether that is what you want. The caller will not have heard the terms. If the policy carries real consequences — a non-refundable deposit, a cancellation fee — it is often better to leave it for the assistant to ask, so the agreement is genuinely theirs.
Field types
The screen shows a different control depending on how the field is set up in Acuity, because Acuity is strict about what it will accept.
Dropdown
Shown as a list of the exact choices you configured in Acuity.
Only those values are accepted. If a value outside the list reaches Acuity, it rejects the whole booking — not just that field. This is why the screen offers the choices rather than a free text box, and why your assistant reads the options to callers when it asks.
Checkbox
Shown as a free text box, with a hint suggesting yes.
Acuity accepts any text for a checkbox field, so there is no fixed list to offer. yes is the
conventional answer for agreement and terms fields.
Text and long text
Shown as a single line or a larger box, matching how the field is set up in Acuity. Anything you type is used as-is.
File upload
Shown as a single fixed choice: Mark as collected in person.
A caller cannot upload a file over the phone, so this is the only workable answer. Choosing it records a placeholder against the booking and lets it complete; you then collect the actual document when the client arrives.
If a required file field has no answer, bookings for every service using that form will fail. The screen flags this with a Can't be collected by phone badge.
Anything else
If Acuity introduces a field type we do not recognise, the screen names the raw type and gives you a text box, rather than guessing at a control that might send an invalid value.
Things worth knowing
Optional fields are never asked. Only required fields hold up a booking, so your assistant skips the rest. You can still set an answer for an optional field if you want it recorded.
Internal forms still count. A form marked hidden in Acuity is labelled Internal form here but is not removed — if it carries a required field, it still blocks phone bookings, and hiding it from this screen would hide a real problem.
The count is per form. A caller only ever meets the questions on the form attached to the service they are booking, so each card counts its own fields rather than showing a page total.
Changes apply to the next call. There is no cache to wait for and no need to redeploy your assistant.
Troubleshooting
Bookings fail for one service but work for others
That service almost certainly has a form with a required field your assistant cannot answer. Open this screen, find the form listed against that service, and look for a Can't be collected by phone badge or an unanswered required field.
The assistant asks more questions than I expected
Every required field without an answer becomes a question. Answer the ones that do not need a caller's input and the count on each card drops immediately.
A saved answer shows as "not a current choice"
The value stored for that field is not in Acuity's current list of options — usually because the options were renamed in Acuity after the answer was set. Your answer is kept and shown so you can see it, but pick a current choice to be safe: an outdated value will be rejected at booking time.
I don't see a form I know exists
Forms attached to no service are hidden, because they cannot affect a booking. Attach it to a service in Acuity and it will appear here.
Related
- Acuity Scheduling Integration — connecting your account and general setup