Automatically cancel unpaid appointments

Sometimes it is useful to collect some kind of payment at the time of booking, perhaps as a reservation fee or because collecting payment offline is impractical. We have long offered a way to do that via our built-in PayPal integration.

But when payment was not just strongly suggested but actually a requirement to letting the appointment stand, you still had to manually check and cancel appointments when clients had not actually processed the payment... up until now that is.

Introducing automatic appointment cancelation for unpaid appointments:

Go to "settings" > "appointment types", click "review & make changes" and in the PayPal section, check the "Auto-cancel unpaid" box and save.

You also should make sure the appointment type is set to require confirmation (a bit higher up on that same page, as we won't cancel a confirmed appointment no matter what).

What this feature does is automatically cancel still unpaid appointments roughly a day after it has been entered in the system. We need this delay in order to account for the time it takes people to go through the payment process, fetch their credit card and so on, as well as processing time proper (as we register the payment only after it has been successfully processed by PayPal). The system will then notify the client via email if the appointment was canceled.

Hopefully this will save some of you from having to keep an eye on new appointments.

As usual, feel free to give us some feedback on this one.