With TimelyPay's card capture function, you will be able to protect your revenue by taking cancellation fee payments from a client's saved card.
Once you've enabled card capture you'll be able to charge your clients when they cancel outside of your cancellation policy and charge no-shows for for your wasted time.
Setting a Cancellation Fee
This setting will be under the Online Payments page.
Businesses can only use this setting if they are not taking online deposits/payments.
The first thing you'll need to do is to turn on card capture. Turning card capture on will require clients to save their card and agree to your cancellation policy before their can make a booking or payment online with your business. They will need to save their card in online booking even if no deposit is being paid.
To activate the Card Capture setting, go to Setup > Online Payments then click the box that says 'Activate card capture'.
Once this is enabled, you can set your cancellation fees.
Businesses can set a Fixed or Percentage of their service for their no-show/cancellation fees. If a business has set a fee, they need to fill out their Custom cancellation terms:
Charging a Cancellation Fee
Businesses can charge no-show or cancellation fees against clients’ saved cards in 2 ways.
1. When you're cancelling an appointment, which will then remove the appointment from the calendar after it’s been cancelled.
2. When you’re editing an appointment, once you select Did not show, you can charge a no-show/cancellation fee, but the appointment will not be removed from the calendar.
If a staff member chooses to charge a fee, Timely pre-populates the fee with the amount set by the business owner, and they can only charge a fee that is equal to or less than this amount.
You'll then see when and which policy the client has agreed to, so staff members are confident that they can charge them a fee.
If the staff chooses to charge the fee, they will be taken to the checkout flow, so they can use the client’s saved card to charge it.
Note: please make sure you are selecting the saved card option if you wish to charge the card the client has added. If you choose any other option it will not automatically charge this card and you will need to manually take payment in your business
Once a fee is charged, Timely will automatically send the client an email about it, and also give an option to the staff member to send an SMS in case they want to send them a personalised message about it. This SMS is taken from your SMS allowance.
Example email the client will receive about the fee.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I capture cards from offline bookings?
You can do this by going to the client file and clicking Add Card. You can find more information on saving cards in store here: Saving Credit Card Details In-Store with TimelyPay. You can also direct clients to the My Cards section of the Client Login, which will allow clients to save a card without making a booking.
Who has access to charging no-shows/cancellation fees?
All staff members who have access to raising a sale will be able to charge fees too. However, only business owners will have access to set how much they want to charge, and staff members can only charge a fee that is equal to or less than this amount.
What happens if a saved card does not have sufficient balance?
We will prompt the staff member to send an online payment link to the client or select another payment method instead if the payment fails.