Booking policies

A customer who cancels an hour before — or never turns up — leaves you with a slot you can't refill and nothing to show for it. This page is where you put a deadline, a fee, and a card on file in place so that stops happening, and where you make customers actually see the policy before they book.

Everything lives under Bookings → Settings. Each policy is a row you click open, edit, and save on its own. Changes only ever apply to new bookings — existing ones keep the rules they were made under.

Open in app: Booking settings

Decide whether customers can cancel at all

Open the Cancellation & Rescheduling row. The first switch, Allow cancellation, controls online cancellation: turn it off and customers can't cancel online — they have to contact you directly, and you handle it by hand.

Leave it on, then pick a Policy. Flexible is the simple, fee-free default: customers cancel for free up to two hours before the appointment. Custom is where you set your own deadline and fee — covered below.

The cancellation deadline is enforced at cancel time. When a customer tries to cancel through the online funnel, mobile app, or the AI assistant after the deadline has passed, the cancellation is blocked — they receive a message telling them the deadline has passed and the fee that would apply. Owner and staff cancellations from the schedule are never blocked. The fee itself is still charged by you after the fact (see below).

Charge a fee for late cancellations

Switch the Policy to Custom to unlock the fee controls.

Set the Deadline first — how many hours before the appointment a customer can still cancel for free. You can set anything from 1 hour up to 168 hours (a full 7 days), so a strict salon can demand a week's notice while a walk-in barber asks for one hour.

Then set the Late cancellation fee:

• No fee — a deadline with no charge (useful purely to close late online cancels).
• Fixed amount — a set dollar figure, entered to the cent.
• Percentage — a share of the service price, capped at 100%.

The deadline decides what a customer is charged, not whether they can cancel. A customer who cancels inside the deadline still cancels — they just owe the fee.

Forgive a regular's first slip

Under a custom fee you'll see First cancellation free, which waives the fee the very first time each customer cancels late. This toggle is currently not adjustable from settings.

Set rescheduling to follow the same rule

The row is called Cancellation & Rescheduling for a reason: rescheduling rides on the cancellation deadline you just set. There's no separate reschedule window — if your cancellation deadline is 24 hours, customers can move an appointment up to 24 hours before it, and not after. Set one deadline and both behaviours follow it.

Connect a card so the fee is actually collectable

A fee is only worth setting if you can charge it. Until you connect a payment account, the Fixed amount and Percentage options stay greyed out and a notice prompts you to set up Payment Protection — the link jumps you straight there.

Open the Payment Protection row. If you're not connected yet you'll see Stripe Not Connected and a Go to Payments button; once connected the row shows Connected to Stripe with your account email. Payment Protection sits behind the online-payments part of your plan, so if the row is locked, your subscription tier is the reason — see Payments overview.

Make every customer save a card to book

Once connected, turn on Require Card for Booking. From then on, customers must save a valid card to complete a booking. The card is checked but not charged at booking time — it's there only so you have something to charge if they don't show.

This is the closest thing to a deposit. There's no separate upfront-deposit setting; holding a card is how you secure low-commitment bookings without taking money in advance. The View Stripe Dashboard link opens your Stripe account to review payments and payouts.

Charge a no-show after the fact

Requiring a card doesn't charge anyone automatically. When a customer fails to show, you charge the fee yourself from that appointment — the system works out the amount from your policy (the fixed figure or the percentage of the service price) and bills the card on file. Staff can also override that amount for a one-off case where the standard fee doesn't fit.

So the two halves are separate: the fee rule lives under Cancellation & Rescheduling, the card to charge it against lives under Payment Protection, and the actual charge happens when you mark the no-show.

The no-show fee is always the same fee your cancellation policy sets — there's no separate no-show amount to configure. If your policy is Flexible (or Custom with No fee), marking a booking no-show won't offer a charge option at all, since there's nothing to charge.

Force the policy in front of customers before they confirm

A policy nobody reads protects nobody. Open Custom Information Sections to add a block of text that appears at the very end of the booking flow — after the summary, right above the confirm button — so it's the last thing a customer sees before committing.

Add a section, give it a title like Cancellation Policy (up to 100 characters) and the body text (up to 2000), and save. You can add up to five sections and reorder them with the up and down arrows. Each section also has its own on/off switch, so you can park a seasonal notice without deleting it. For a separate, signed record kept on the customer's profile, use a policy form instead.

Tips

• A fee needs a saved card. Walk-in and cash bookings have no card on file, so collect those fees in person — the automatic charge has nothing to bill.
• Cancelling inside the deadline still cancels the booking. The deadline only decides whether they owe the fee, not whether the slot frees up.
• Rescheduling has no window of its own — it copies the cancellation deadline. Change one and you change both.
• Requiring a card is not auto-charging. The card is only validated at booking; a no-show fee is charged by you afterwards, from the appointment.
• There is no upfront deposit. To secure a booking, require a card rather than collecting money in advance.

Related

• Appointment settings — booking windows, approval, and the other rules that work alongside policies.
• Payments overview — connecting your payment account and how fees are collected.
• Forms — capture an explicit, signed policy acknowledgement on the customer's profile.