Both you and your customer can change a booking. What differs is how late each of you can do it.
From the admin
Go to Bookings and click the appointment to open it. The buttons at the bottom depend on its status: Confirm, Cancel booking, No-show, Complete or Reopen. Edit moves it to another time, changes the services or gives it to someone else.
You are not bound by the cancellation window, which applies only to customers. From the admin you can change a booking at any time, including one that has already started.
The customer is emailed automatically when you cancel a booking, or when you edit one that hasn't happened yet. You do not need to message them separately. Marking a no-show or completing a booking sends nothing. Owners and managers also have Delete, in the ⋯ menu: it frees the time and tells nobody.
From the customer's side
A customer with an account on your booking site can manage their booking from it, without calling you. A guest's emails tell them to contact you and offer them an account; signing up with the same email brings their bookings into it. What they can do is bounded by two settings under Settings → Booking:
- The Cancellation window: how many hours before the start they can cancel.
- The Reschedule window: how many hours before the start they can move it.
Both are 24 hours unless you change them. Outside those windows the buttons are not offered and they have to contact you. This stops a customer cancelling a 07:00 appointment at 06:55, and still lets customers who give you enough notice make changes without you.
What happens to the slot
When a booking is cancelled or marked as a no-show, the time is released immediately and becomes bookable again.
Reopening a booking can fail. If someone else has booked the slot in the meantime, Reopen is refused rather than double-booking you. Use Edit instead: it puts the booking back on at a free time in one step.
Recurring bookings
Customers can repeat an appointment when they book it. Each one in the series is an ordinary booking in your diary, and cancelling one from the admin leaves the rest alone. A customer cancelling from their account can choose to cancel the upcoming ones in the series too.
Payments
If you don't take payment online, cancelling is a calendar action and nothing more: any money that changed hands is between you and the customer, as it always was.
If the customer paid when they booked, the full price or a deposit, one rule decides what happens to it: a cancelled booking is refunded, and a no-show is not.
- They cancel online. Everything they paid goes back to their card on its own. A customer can only cancel online inside your cancellation window, so every cancellation they make themselves is a refunded one.
- You press Cancel booking, at any time and for any reason. Everything they paid goes back on its own.
- They don't turn up, and you press No-show. You keep what they paid.
That last one is also how you keep a deposit when a customer rings to cancel too late. Cancel booking always refunds, however late it is, so if your policy says a late cancellation loses the deposit, mark the booking No-show instead. The time is released either way.
Refunds come out of your own Stripe balance, because the payment went into your account and not ours. Stripe keeps its processing fee on a refunded payment. Rantevo takes 0% in either direction.
Giving money back yourself
Owners and managers have Refund in a paid booking's ⋯ menu, for giving back part or all of a payment on a booking that isn't cancelled. It asks how much, up to what the booking still holds, and the money goes back to the card it came from. If the appointment still goes ahead, the customer then owes you that amount, to pay at the appointment. Rantevo sends no email about a refund, so tell the customer yourself.
Refund isn't offered on a cancelled booking, because that refund has already happened, or while the customer's bank is disputing the charge.