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How to charge a cancellation fee

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In this guide, you will learn how to charge a cancellation fee via TimelyPay. 
 

Timely’s built-in payment solution, TimelyPay, lets you take payments online and in person, so it’s easy for clients to pay you securely. With a quick set up it helps reduce no-shows by letting you take deposits and charge cancellation fees. You can also sell gift vouchers and manage your payments in one place. There are no hidden costs, just pay the standard processing fees, and once a payment is settled, the money is paid into your bank account the next business day. That means no waiting around for payments to clear.

 

 

Timely tip: 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.

 

 

How to charge a cancellation fee

Charging no-show or cancellation fees against clients’ saved cards can be done in 2 ways:
 

A When you're cancelling an appointment, you will then remove the appointment from the calendar after it’s been cancelled.

 

B 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.

 

 

How this works

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 will 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.
 

Timely 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.

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