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 Calendar by clicking the block and choosing Edit. The editor is one screen of collapsible sections — Customer, Service, Appointment, and Payment when money is attached. Change what you need, then press Save booking.
The section headed Service holds more than its name suggests: Price, Status, Payment and the Walk-in toggle are all in there. 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 Start time, then save. You never type an end time — it comes from the start plus the Length (minutes).
09:30 — Booked: Priya Sharma — Travel vaccination
Outside working hours (override).
The Appointment section, with the start-time list open.
- 1Date — a Monday-first calendar. Days the branch or that member of staff is closed are greyed and titled "Closed"; change the employee and the greying changes.
- 2Start time — reads "Pick a date & employee first" until it has a date plus an employee or a location to check against.
- 3The slot list — stepped by your Time slot interval (Settings › Booking rules, 15 minutes by default). A time appears only if it fits both the staff working hours and the branch opening hours, with the service's after-appointment buffer added. Struck-through slots are taken and name the clash.
- 4Length (minutes) — filled from the service, still editable, capped at 1,440.
The booking you are editing is left out of its own clash check, so its current time never reads as taken. "Closed this day." or "No times available." usually means the branch is shut or that person is not working — unless Allow staff to override availability is on in Settings › Booking rules, in which case closed days become selectable with a fallback 08:00–20:00 window, taken slots become clickable, and an amber "Outside working hours (override)." warning appears.
Staff breaks block the public booking form and are drawn on the calendar, but the editor will offer you a slot over someone's lunch anyway. Check the calendar before moving an appointment into the middle of the day.
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.
Drag an appointment to reschedule it. Green = free, red = clash (you can still drop to override).
Quick edit on, an appointment mid-drag, and the quick-edit side panel.
- 1Done — the Quick edit button while the mode is on. Dragging works in Day and Week only; Month shows a hint telling you to switch view.
- 2The ghost block — green where the slot is free, red where it clashes or falls outside working hours. Dropping on red asks "Move it anyway?" and lets you through — how most accidental double-bookings happen.
- 3Availability badge — Slot available or Clash / closed, updating live as you change the fields.
- 4Employee — — Any — removes the assignment, and the appointment vanishes from every named column in Day view into Unassigned.
- 5Full editor — the panel cannot touch the customer, the price, the length, notes, documents or payment.
The clash check only looks at other appointments for the same member of staff, ignores breaks, and reads everything as free when nobody is assigned. And on a paid booking, switching to a cheaper service here fails with a red banner.
If you have hand-typed a Length (minutes), then drag the appointment, change its status from the calendar popup, or save the quick-edit panel, the length silently reverts to the service's default and the end time is recalculated. Set unusual lengths in the full editor, and re-check them after any calendar move.
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 | Nothing — tell them yourself |
| 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 Customisation › Notifications, each with its own on/off switch.
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 use Set status in the calendar popup, where a chip saves immediately with no confirmation.
Can’t go below £45.00 already paid — refund first to lower it.
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, the refund, and the button that does neither.
- 1Status — set to Cancelled and save. The slot frees immediately, the booking greys out on the calendar, 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, or Delete in the calendar popup, 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, 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 Service, 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 Settings › Payments › Transactions › Refund, which offers Full, Half and Custom, then press Sync payments 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. It emails the customer nothing, so tell them yourself. 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 on the calendar and have their own filter chip in Bookings.
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.