Your booking policy: notice, fees and deposits

Your booking policy

If you ask for notice before a cancellation, charge for a missed appointment, take a deposit, or want people to arrive a few minutes early, the person booking should hear it while they are booking — not afterwards, and not for the first time when you charge them.

This card is where you set those terms. What you switch on is stated in the confirmation the person keeps.

Nothing is on until you turn it on

Every line here starts switched off, and every amount starts at zero. If you never open this card, FirstFiveMin says nothing on your behalf about notice, fees or deposits — which is exactly right, because these are your terms, not ours.

Two things follow from that, and both are deliberate:

• A line with nothing filled in says nothing. If you switch on the missed-appointment charge but leave the amount at zero, nobody is told about a "$0 charge" — the line simply does not appear. Fill in the amount and it appears.
• FirstFiveMin never collects any of this. We state your terms; the money is between you and your customer. That is also why the deposit line is your own wording rather than an amount we pick — we do not set it and we do not take it.

The lines you can turn on

• Notice before a change or cancellation — how many hours of warning you would like.
• Charge for a late cancellation — an amount, applied when someone cancels inside that notice window.
• Charge for a missed appointment — an amount, for a no-show.
• Mention a deposit — your own sentence, in English and Spanish. Write it the way you would say it.
• Ask people to arrive early — how many minutes.

Under the form is What the person will read. That preview is not a mock-up: it is generated by the same code that writes the confirmation, so what you see there is word-for-word what your customer receives.

Where it shows up

What you switch on is printed in the booking confirmation text, ahead of the opt-out line, and on the page a person uses to change or cancel.

Good to know

• Notice can be up to 336 hours (two weeks). Arrival can be up to 240 minutes.
• Amounts are capped at $1,000, which is well above any normal late-cancel or no-show fee.
• Changing your policy does not change appointments already booked — a policy is stated at the time of booking, and the confirmation the person already holds is the one that applies to them.