Change, reschedule or cancel
Move an appointment, change its details, or call it off.
Someone rings to move their flu jab to Thursday; someone else cancels on the morning. Both are a few clicks, but what Booked does next depends on which one you use: some changes email the customer, some free the slot, some touch the money.
Change the details of a booking
Open the appointment from Bookings by clicking its row, or from the Diary by clicking the block and choosing Open booking. The editor is one screen of cards — Customer, Appointment, Price and status, and Payment when money is attached. Change what you need, then press Save booking; the booking stays open afterwards.
The Price and status card holds Price, Status, Payment and the Walk-in switch. And the Cancel button in the footer discards your edits and goes back — it does not cancel the appointment.
Move it to another time
Rescheduling happens in the Appointment section: change Date, then pick a Time, then save. You never type an end time — it comes from the start plus the Length.
Hepatitis A Vaccination · Mon, 28 Sept 2026 · 09:30 · 45 min
Leave it on “Anyone free” and picking a time names who is free then.
The times are checked for this length.
break or hours another booking already gone · still pickable
The Appointment section, with the day’s times showing.
- 1Date — Change opens a Monday-first month picker. Days with free time for this service get a dot; change With and the dots change.
- 2Length — filled from the service, still editable. The times are checked for this length.
- 3The day’s times — stepped by your Time slot interval (Settings › Booking rules, 15 minutes by default), with a count of how many are free. A time is plain only if it fits both the staff working hours and the branch opening hours, with room for the length.
- 4A slot’s colour — red outline means another booking, amber means a break or outside the hours, and grey (shown only when staff may override availability) means already gone. The red and amber ones are greyed out and locked unless staff may override availability; then they stay pickable, and a note underneath names the conflict.
The booking you are editing is left out of its own clash check, so its current time never reads as taken. “Nothing open on this day.” usually means the branch is shut or that person is not working. If Let staff override availability is on in Settings › Booking rules, the blocked times become pickable and an Another time picker lets you choose any hour. With it off, Booked refuses to save a time that is not free.
Every time that is not free says why: the other booking, the break (“Priya Sharma: Lunch, 13:00–14:00.”) or the hours. Breaks block these times just as they block the public booking form.
Drag it on the calendar instead
For a few moves the calendar is quicker. Press Quick edit — the button becomes Done — and appointments become draggable in Day and Week view. Sideways changes the day, up and down the time, and in Day view dragging into another column reassigns the appointment to that member of staff.
Diary
Days Tom Wright is free.
Quick edit on, an appointment being dragged, and the quick-edit side panel.
- 1Quick edit — while the mode is on the button turns dark and reads Done, and a note above the grid explains the colours. Dragging works in Day and Week only; Month shows a hint telling you to switch view.
- 2The ghost block — green where the slot looks free, red where it clashes with that person’s other bookings or lands on a day they or the branch are closed. Dropping on red leaves the booking where it was, unless staff may override availability; then it asks “Move it anyway?” and lets you through.
- 3Staff — Anyone free lets the time decide: whoever is free at the time you pick takes it, and if nobody is, the booking stays with the person who had it.
- 4Date and Time in the panel — "Days Tom Wright is free" dots the picker, and the free times for that day are listed with a count. When staff may override availability, Another time underneath takes anything, in 15-minute steps, with a warning if it is outside the hours.
- 5Full editor — the panel changes the service, length, staff, branch, date, time and status; for the customer, the price, notes, documents or payment, open the full editor.
The drag colour is a quick check: it looks at other appointments for the same member of staff and at days the person or branch is closed, but not at breaks or the hours within a day, and it reads everything as free when nobody is assigned. With Let staff override availability off, Booked checks properly when it saves, and a move onto a break or outside the hours fails with a red banner and snaps back. On a paid booking, switching to a cheaper service in the panel fails the same way.
If a booking has a length of its own — typed by hand, or the longer appointment of a group booking — dragging it, or pressing Confirm or No-show on its popover, silently reverts it to the service’s default and recalculates the end time. The quick-edit panel and the full editor keep the length you see, so use one of those for these bookings.
What the customer is told
Each save sends at most one message, chosen in priority order: a status change wins, then a new date or time, then everything else. Change the status and the time together and only the status email goes out.
| What you change | What the customer receives |
|---|---|
| Status to Confirmed | "Booking approved" |
| Status to Pending | "Booking pending" |
| Status to Cancelled | "Booking cancelled", with a Call us to rebook button |
| Status to Completed or No-show | Nothing |
| The date or the start time | "Booking rescheduled" |
| The customer, service, staff member, location or price | "Booking changed" |
| The length, the Walk-in toggle, a note or a document | Nothing |
| Refunding the payment | "Booking refunded", with the amount, as soon as the refund goes through |
| Deleting the booking | Nothing |
Dragging on the calendar counts as an edit, so it emails the customer the moment you let go — no confirmation step, no quiet move. The wording of every message lives in Messages, each with its own on/off switch. Booked adds what applies to that booking underneath the wording for you: everyone in a group booking, the join link when a video appointment is confirmed, moved or changed, and, on all but the cancellation and refund emails, what has been paid and what is left to pay.
None of these changes sends your own team an alert. Those go only when a customer cancels or moves an appointment themselves, from their customer account; see Team alerts.
Cancel it — don't delete it
Cancelling and deleting sound alike and behave nothing alike. Cancelling is a status: set Status to Cancelled and save, or press Cancel booking in the editor’s Quick actions, which saves immediately with no confirmation. In the Diary, use the Status dropdown in the quick-edit panel.
Refunds return the amount, and your processing fee, to the customer. To change the payment, refund it here — the status can’t be edited by hand.
Cancelling a paid appointment: the status (1), the refund (2), and the button that does neither (3).
- 1Status — set to Cancelled and save — or press Cancel booking in the Quick actions. The slot frees immediately, the booking greys out in the diary, the event is removed from a connected Google or Microsoft calendar, and the customer is emailed.
- 2Refund payment — separate from cancelling. Cancelling never returns money and refunding never changes the status; do both if the appointment is off and the customer is owed.
- 3Cancel — the footer button. It discards unsaved edits and returns to the list. It is not how you cancel an appointment.
Deleting is the bin icon on a row of the Bookings list, behind one "Delete this booking?" confirm. There is no trash and no undo, nothing is emailed, the event stays on a connected calendar, and the notes, documents and activity entries are orphaned. Cancelling keeps the record your reporting and your cancellation rate are built on, so keep deletion for genuine mistakes — a test booking, a duplicate.
A cancelled slot is released the instant you save — and offered to anyone on your waiting list, as a moved booking’s old time is — so if you cancel the wrong appointment the time may be gone by the time you notice.
Refunds, and what they don't do
The Payment section only appears when there is money on the booking. On an unpaid appointment there is nothing to see — use the Payment dropdown in Price and status, which offers Unpaid and Paid (cash / in person).
Refund payment returns the whole charge; there is no part-refund here. For part of it use Payments › Your money, where the row’s Refund offers All of it, Half or An amount, then press Sync payments (the round-arrow button beside Walk-in on the Bookings toolbar) on the Bookings screen so the appointment catches up. A partial refund never flips a booking to Refunded — it still reads Paid for the original amount, so the booking and the money screen disagree.
Once money has been recorded you cannot price the booking below what was paid, or mark a paid booking unpaid — both fail with a red notice telling you to refund first. Cash marked by hand is the exception: no amount is stored, so the price stays editable. A payment the customer's bank has disputed cannot be refunded at all — you get Appeal this chargeback instead.
It cannot be undone — a refunded booking offers no way back to paid. The customer gets the Booking refunded email, which says how much is coming back and nothing about the appointment. And it leaves the appointment Confirmed, still holding its slot, until you cancel it.
No-shows and completed visits
After the day, tidy up: Completed for the people who came, No-show for the ones who did not. Neither sends the customer anything — usually what you want, though it also means a connected Google or Microsoft calendar is not updated. No-shows turn red in the Diary, and on Bookings the Any status dropdown can show only them. Marked one by mistake? Not a no-show on the Diary popover puts it back to Confirmed — which sends the Booking approved email.
Marking someone a no-show does nothing to their money: keep the fee, or refund in the Payment section. Every change lands in the booking's Activity log with the old and new value of each field — in raw internal words, so expect "Changed status: confirmed → no_show" rather than friendly labels.