Your payments and balance
Every transaction, your balance, and what is on its way to your bank.
Booked keeps one running record of every card payment it takes for you — what came in, what has been refunded, and what is on its way to your bank. There are two views of it: a quick one inside WordPress, and a fuller one in your Booked account.
Where the money screens live
Inside WordPress, everything is on Booked › Settings › Payments. Two things must be true before you see anything there:
- Your licence key must be activated. Until then the tab shows only Activate your licence to take payments and a Go to Licence button.
- Booked Payments must be switched on and verified. Clicking Activate — it’s instant is half the job: balances, transactions, payouts and disputes stay hidden until you finish Set up payouts. An almost-empty tab with a Complete verification button on it is the sign.
Only staff with the Booked settings permission can open this area — reception accounts never see your balance.
Every control on the Payments tab saves itself the moment you use it. Deposits, Booking references and Bank statement name do need Save settings — but they live on the Bookings tab, not this one.
Your balance: available and on the way
The Your money card opens with two figures, read live from the card network each time you open the tab and shown in the currency set under Settings › Region & currency. Your processing fee comes off automatically, so these are the amounts you actually receive — there is no separate fee bill to reconcile.
Configure how Booked works.
| Date | Appointment | Customer | Card | Amount | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26 Aug 09:12 | GB-00214 | Priya Sharma | ····4242 | £45.00 | Succeeded | Refund |
| 25 Aug 16:40 | GB-00211 | Jonathan Meade | ····8821 | £120.00 (−£60.00) | Part refunded | Refund |
| 25 Aug 11:05 | GB-00209 | Emily Carter | ····1904 | £25.00 | Chargeback | Appeal |
| 24 Aug 14:22 | GB-00205 | Aisha Rahman | — | £18.00 | Refunded |
Settings › Payments — balances and recent transactions.
- 1Payments tab — the Settings tabs are a vertical rail down the left of the panel.
- 2Available — cleared money you can send to your bank now, on schedule or with Pay out now.
- 3On the way — takings that have not finished clearing yet.
- 4Search — filters as you type across the booking reference, the customer’s name and email, the last four card digits and the amount.
- 5Appointment reference — a link straight to that booking in Bookings.
- 6Row action — Refund, Appeal on a disputed payment, or nothing when neither applies.
Reading the transactions list
The Card column shows the last four digits, or a dash when no card details were recorded. A part-refunded payment keeps its original amount with the returned portion beside it, so £120.00 (−£60.00) means £60 is still yours. The status badge decides what the row lets you do:
| Status | What it means | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Succeeded | Paid and not returned. | Refund |
| Part refunded | Some money has gone back already. | Refund the rest — you can refund in several goes |
| Refunded | The whole payment has been returned. | Nothing further |
| Chargeback | The customer’s bank has disputed it. | Appeal, or a read-only word such as Under review, Won or Submitted |
Two limits are worth knowing. The list holds only the 12 most recent card payments, with no date range, no status filter and no export — for those, use your Booked account. And Appeal does not open the response form: it scrolls the page down to the Chargebacks & disputes card, where you click Respond on the case. That card is hidden until your first dispute, which is why it seems to appear from nowhere.
Here you get Full, Half or Custom. The Refund payment button on the booking itself is always a full refund. A part refund made here does not change the booking’s payment status — the appointment still reads Paid in full. And the amount and your processing fee for it go back to the customer, not to you.
Linking a payment to its appointment
Every payment is stamped with the booking reference — your prefix, the booking number padded to five digits, then your suffix, all set under Settings › Booking rules › Booking references. Clicking it opens that appointment, where the Payment section repeats the status, amount paid and method. If a payment ever looks orphaned, Sync payments in the Bookings header matches recent card payments back to their appointments and flags disputed ones. It also runs quietly whenever you open the Bookings list, and is safe to press repeatedly.
Three cases make an amount look wrong when it is not:
- Courses take one payment for the whole course; the follow-up visits are created at £0, so one charge covers several appointments.
- Group bookings price the appointment per person, but the deposit is worked out on one person’s price — so even a full-amount deposit reads Deposit paid.
- Bundled add-ons for the same visit keep their own prices on their own rows, but only the main service is charged at checkout.
Payments are matched to bookings by the number in the reference. A prefix with five or more digits in it — 12345-, say — gets picked up instead of the booking number, and payments attach to the wrong appointment. Changing the prefix later is safe: old payments keep the old wording, and matching still works.
Payouts to your bank
Below the transactions, Payouts to your bank lists your six most recent payouts with their arrival date, status and amount. The block is hidden until the first one is sent, and the status words come straight from the banking platform untranslated — paid, pending, in_transit.
The Payout schedule card sets how often the balance goes out: Daily (the default), Weekly, Monthly or Manual. Pay out now sends the whole available balance at once — there is no partial payout — and is disabled while there is no bank account on file, with only the No bank account on file text as a clue. On Manual, nothing is ever sent automatically; the money builds up until you ask for it.
| 22 Aug · paid | £980.40 |
| 21 Aug · in_transit | £412.00 |
| 20 Aug · pending | £264.15 |
Payouts land automatically in your bank. Everything’s managed right here — no separate accounts to log into.
Refunds and chargebacks have taken your balance below zero, so there’s nothing to pay out. Your next takings clear this first, and payouts start again automatically once you’re back in the black.
Payout history, and the schedule card while the balance is below zero.
- 1Raw payout status — in_transit means the money has left and is with your bank, pending means it is queued, paid means it has landed.
- 2Balance to recover — where Available to pay out normally sits. A minus figure means refunds or chargebacks have taken out more than has come in.
- 3Nothing to do — Pay out now is hidden entirely while the balance is negative, and returns on its own.
When your balance goes negative
Refund a large payment in a quiet week, or lose a chargeback, and the balance can drop below zero. Booked relabels the figure Balance to recover and hides Pay out now. It looks alarming, but nothing is broken and there is nothing to pay back by hand: your next takings clear the shortfall first and payouts resume by themselves. In your Booked account the same state reads To recover, with Cleared by your next takings beneath it.
One related trap: Update details adds a new bank account and makes it the default for future payouts only — money already in transit still lands in the old one.
Searching, filtering and exporting
For anything beyond the last dozen payments, use the Payments page in your Booked account. It covers every site on your account, and it is the only place with a status filter and an export.
Payments
Your Booked balance, payouts and every card payment across your sites.
| Date | Site | Appointment | Customer | Card | Amount | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26 Aug | Bramhall branch | GB-00214 | Priya Sharma | ····4242 | £45.00 | Succeeded |
| 25 Aug | Poynton branch | GB-00198 | Daniel Okafor | ····7702 | £75.00 | Succeeded |
| 24 Aug | Bramhall branch | GB-00205 | Aisha Rahman | — | £18.00 | Refunded |
The Payments page in your Booked account — all sites, filtering and CSV export.
- 1Site chips — All sites plus one per site. The payout controls need a single site chosen; with several in scope they ask you to pick one.
- 2Next payout — the amount and the date it arrives, or No payout scheduled on manual payouts. This tile is not in the WordPress view.
- 3Search — the same live search, plus the site name.
- 4Status filter — All statuses, Succeeded or Refunded. With no matches you get No payments match. Try a different search or filter.
- 5Export CSV — downloads the filtered list. The Payouts to your bank table has its own export — usually the one your bookkeeper wants.
Two differences when you work from there: refunds issued in your Booked account are full refunds only, so a half refund has to be done in WordPress; and Appeal opens that site’s WordPress dashboard on the Payments tab in a new tab, because a chargeback can only be answered on the site it belongs to.