Setting a payment policy to prevent no-shows

If you've turned on online payments, it's important to be clear about your refund policy.

• Refunds are a manual decision, not an automatic one: Biseo has no time-based automatic refund rule (e.g. "refunded automatically if cancelled 24 hours before the booking"). When you change a booking's status to cancelled or no-show, the admin screen shows an option to refund or keep (forfeit) any deposit that was already charged, and you (or the assigned staff member) make that choice yourself, case by case.
• In other words, whether to refund isn't decided automatically by the system — it's a human decision made on every individual booking. There's no setting that forfeits a deposit automatically once a certain amount of time has passed.
• For any booking where you decide to keep (forfeit) the deposit rather than refund it, the amount already charged through Stripe simply stays as revenue.

Example: Say a scalp treatment clinic took a A$30 deposit for a booking, and the customer simply doesn't show up that morning with no message at all. When the owner changes that booking's status to no-show, the admin screen presents a choice: "Refund A$30" or "Keep (forfeit) A$30". Since this was a same-day no-show with no advance notice, the owner chooses to keep it — that A$30 is simply counted as revenue, with no further action needed. Now compare that with the same customer cancelling two days ahead of time: on that same screen, the owner could instead choose "Refund", sending the A$30 back to the customer's card. In both cases, nothing happens automatically — the owner makes the call each time by clicking the relevant button.

• To reduce disputes with customers, we recommend spelling out in advance — in the "Terms" section of your booking page — the criteria you'll use when deciding whether to refund a deposit on a no-show or cancellation (for example, "same-day cancellations without prior notice will not be refunded"). This wording itself isn't a policy Biseo enforces automatically; it's something you define and disclose to customers yourself.