How to Protect your Services and Time with Square Appointments

[Creed]

Hi Sellers!

We know appointment cancellations happen, and we want to make sure you are still able to protect your services and your time. We’ve detailed a couple of protection options below that you can use with Square Appointments.

Set a Custom Cancellation Policy with Square Appointments

With Square Appointments, you can protect your business against no-shows with a customized cancellation policy. You can require that clients add their payment card when requesting an appointment with you online. If your client doesn’t show up, or cancels outside of your cancellation window, you can choose to enforce your cancellation policy.

To enable a cancellation policy:

1. Go to Customers > Appointments > Settings > Calendar & Booking.
2. Under “Online Booking,” toggle on “Clients May Reschedule or Cancel their Own Appointments”.
3. Set a cut-off time, then click Save.

Note: This feature does not need to be on to edit the policy. Your cancellation policy will show in your online booking flow and at the bottom of the confirmation emails your clients receive.

Set up No-Show Protection

Once a cut-off time has been defined, you can also set up No-Show Protection:

1. Go to Customers > Appointments > Settings > Payments & Cancellations.
2. Click Booking with No-Show Protection.
3. Select whether you’d like to charge a flat fee per appointment, or choose to charge an individual fee for each service.
4. Click Save.

Keep in mind, your clients will be required to add a payment card to complete their booking. This card can be charged if your client violates your cancellation policy. If you want to save your client’s card on file for future payments, you will need to ask them to select Save Card when booking the appointment.

Learn more about setting a custom cancellation policy with Square Appointments.

Use Card On File For No-Show Protection

If you’ve set up your online booking site to require a credit card for no-show protection, the option to use a customer’s card on file will display when creating an appointment for them from the Calendar of your Square Appointments dashboard.

1. From the Calendar of your Square Appointments dashboard, click or drag the desired time slot.
2. Enter your customer’s name. If their card is saved on file, it will be noted to the right of their name.
3. Under Payment, toggle No-show Protection.
4. Complete entering appointment details > click Save.

Also, when your customer adds their card information to their Customer Account, you’ll be able to view and charge their card online or directly from the app. 

Learn more about managing your Customer Directory online.

Require Appointment Prepayment

With Square Appointments, you can accept prepayment in full for all fixed price services when your clients book online. The card processing rate for online client prepayments is 2.9% + 30¢.

To set up prepayments:

1. Visit Customers > Appointments > Settings > Payments and Cancellations in your online Square Appointments dashboard.
2. Select Require Prepayment.
3. Add your cancellation policy > click Save.

Once client prepayment is set up for online bookings, you can also save your client’s card on file to charge for appointments created from your online Square Appointments dashboard.

Note: The maximum transaction size for prepayment is $5,000.

Learn more about Customer Prepayment for Square Appointments.

Have any questions or feedback? Let us know how we can help below.

[Michael_L]

It's great to have all these options!

I'd like to encourage anyone building a cancellation policy to think like your customers, though.  If you were a client and had to cancel an appointment, would you expect to be penalized? 

In our business we do have people who don't show up but we've chosen not to "punish" them with cancellation fees or required pre-payment for services.  We just reach out to them if they are repeat offenders and find out what's going on.  It's tricky to know what is best but we chose not to annoy them in the hope that they will return as clients one day 🙂