Booking policies, deposits & cancellations

These rules decide what your booking page will and will not let a client do. You will find them all under Settings → Booking Policies, and they take effect as soon as you save.

Scheduling rules

Setting	Unit	Default	What it does
Min. advance notice	hours	2	How soon before a slot a client may still book it. At the default, a 3pm slot stops being bookable online at 1pm. Raise it if you need preparation time; lower it if you want to fill same-day gaps.
Max. days ahead	days	60	How far into the future the booking page will show availability. Keeping this tight reduces the number of bookings that get rescheduled because plans changed.
Cancellation window	hours	24	The cut-off before the appointment after which a client can no longer cancel themselves online. This is also the boundary your no-show fee is meant to sit behind.
Buffer between appointments	minutes	0	Padding added after every booking, for turnaround, cleaning or notes. The buffer is held on the calendar, so it cannot be booked over.
Reminder before	hours	24	When the automatic reminder goes out. Set this comfortably outside your cancellation window, so a client who cannot attend still has time to cancel rather than simply not turning up.

Deposits & refunds

Refund rules are set per service, not once for the whole business — you will find them on each service under Services → edit → Requires payment. A quick consultation and an all-day treatment rarely deserve the same notice period, and the service is the only place where that difference is actually known.

Two thresholds produce three outcomes, measured against how long remains until the appointment starts:

Setting	Unit	Default	What it does
Full refund beyond	hours	18	Cancel with more notice than this and the whole deposit is returned automatically.
Partial refund beyond	hours	12	Between this and the full-refund mark, part of the deposit is returned. Below it, nothing is. Must be shorter than the full-refund window — the form and the API both refuse to save it the other way round.
Partial refund amount	%	50	How much comes back inside that middle band.

Deposits and no-show fees are charged to your clients through your own connected payment account, in your own currency. That is separate from your Upkilo subscription, which is billed in USD. Charging a no-show fee is also a decision with legal weight in some places — state the policy on your booking page before you enable it.

What clients are allowed to do

Setting	Default	What it does
Allow online rescheduling	On	Clients can move their own appointment from the booking portal instead of contacting you.
Allow online cancellation	On	Clients can cancel without calling. Turning this off does not stop cancellations — it moves them to your phone.
Auto-confirm bookings	On	New bookings are confirmed immediately with no manual review. Turn it off if you want to approve each one first.
Require client confirmation	Off	The client must confirm the booking by email or SMS before it is treated as confirmed.

How these interact

The settings are individually simple and easy to get into a contradictory state together. Two worth checking after any change:

If your reminder goes out later than your cancellation window closes, clients receive their reminder at a point where they can no longer cancel — which converts would-be cancellations into no-shows.
Your full-refund window is set per service, while the cancellation window above is set once for the business. If a service allows a full refund at 18 hours but your cancellation window closes at 24, a client hits a period where they can still be refunded but can no longer cancel themselves — so they call you instead.

Every service starts at 18 hours for a full refund, 12 hours for 50%, and nothing inside 12. If those suit you, there is nothing to change — but they apply to each service individually, so a service you create later starts from the same defaults rather than inheriting whatever you set on the last one.