Square appointment booking request

[AztecValet]

hi guys, I have a mobile valeting business with 2 staff. We have over 100 weekly/monthly recurring appointments with durations ranging from 2hours to 6hours. 

As the appointments are carried out monthly they can end up being at different times and days each month. this then reflects on my Square Online Booking Flow by appearing that we have no availability for weeks on end. We are proactive with the appointments and work them to fit the areas we are visiting and customers availability.

At the moment we usually communicate with customers via calls or messages and agree appointments that way then put an appointment in, without creating an invoice and setting up for them to pay a deposit then the balance on completion i have no way of getting any seller protection. I have set up an item with a Square Online Checkout link that i forward on to all customers that is named "Deposit". the customer pays the deposit and it comes through to me as an order. I then have to manually create an appointment and notify them through the square app.

by doing this i then have no seller protection (card on file, no show protection) as they have completed their order and ive created manually created them an appointment that has no link to the "Deposit" order they made.

My thought is that when a customer clicks onto Square Online Booking it would be great if they could "Request an appointment" and then send me all their details and await a booking which would then ask for their details and require card on file/no show protection.

(when a customer clicks onto square online booking they choose a service which already has a duration set up and can sometimes make the availability seem incorrect)

or if i could input an appointment for a customer and when they receive the notification of the appointment they then had to add a card on file, or put in their card details for no show protection.

Am i missing something or could this be implemented somehow?

many thanks in advance

Aaron

[k_atie]

Hey @AztecValet! Thank you for your post and congrats on joining us in the Community! We're delighted to have you here. Let's see if I can find a workaround for your situation. 

At the moment, Square doesn't facilitate deposits when taking appointments. However, we do facilitate client prepayments, where your customers must pay for the full fixed price of your services when they book online. 

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 £3,800. The card processing rate for online client prepayment is 2.5% per transaction.

Additionally, we do not facilitate appointment booking requests at this time. However, you can set up your booking site so that you can either accept or decline appointments. To set this up:

1. Go to your Square Dashboard > Customers > Appointments.
2. Online Booking > Settings. 
3. Under Reservation Guarantee, select "Business must accept or decline all appointment requests."
4. Click Save. 

This will allow you to decline an appointment based on your availability and to contact your customer at a time that better suits your own and your customers' needs.

Hope this helps.