This is the screen used to compose and send an SMS message to a customer. For background, see Concepts|SMS.

The fields are as follows:
Phone - the phone number to which the SMS will be sent. If the customer has multiple phone contact numbers that are SMS enabled, then there will be a pull-down list for you to select from.
Message - the text of the SMS message - a maximum of 160 characters. The counter on the top of the box (120 in the above sample) shows how many more characters you can enter before your text will be truncated. 'Muffet' has a red underline to indicate that the browser's spell checker is unhappy.

Press the OK button to send the SMS.

Note that you can use macros when composing the message. You may find the following expression to be useful when building the macro called say 'smsr' using Administration|Lookups|Macros

 concat($patient.name,' is now due. Pls call ",party:getTelephone($location),' for an appointment. Thanks ',$practice.name) 

You could also create suitable macros for each vaccination, eg rg6 for 'Reminder: G6 Vaccination - "

Then you can simply type rg6 smsr into the SMS message text and press Enter to expand it to generate the text:
Reminder: G6 Vaccination - Muffet is now due. Pls call 9123 4567 for an appointment. Thanks Pets-R-Us

Note however, that the above macro will fail to expand if there is no current patient.

 

If you are using a macro that expands to a large amount of text - for example:

concat('Reminder: ',$patient.name,'.
Your appointment for ',$appointment.reason,' is on ',date:format($appointment.startTime,
"EEEE dd/MM/yy 'at' h:mma"),
'
Pls call ',party:getTelephone($location),' if you cannot attend. Thanks')

there is a possibility that the resulting text is longer than 160 characters. If this happens, then what you entered as the macro (eg @apr - for appointment reminder) will disappear, but the SMS text will be blank. If you press OK, then you will get a failure message saying "Field must contain at most 160 characters". The first 160 characters will not be displayed.

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