Cancellation policy generator

The First Time You Need One Is the First Time You Cannot Use It

Somebody has not turned up. The hour is gone, the chair sat empty, and you would quite like to charge them something. Then you realise you never told them there was a charge, which means the conversation you are about to have is one you will lose or, more likely, one you will decide not to have at all. A cancellation policy is worth nothing at the moment you first want it, and that is exactly why the cancellation policy generator above takes a minute rather than an afternoon.

Written before you need it, it does its job by existing. Written after, it is an argument.

What the Cancellation Policy Generator Asks

Five things, and the policy on the right rewrites itself as you answer them.

• Business name. It appears in the first line, because a policy that names you reads as yours rather than as boilerplate.
• Business type. Ten trades, and this changes more of the wording than you would expect.
• Notice required, in hours. Opens on 24.
• Late-cancellation fee. A percentage or a fixed amount, your choice, with the number beside it. It opens on 50 per cent.
• Whether you take a deposit. Off by default, and it adds a paragraph when you turn it on.

What comes out is four or five short paragraphs under a heading, in plain language, with a copy button. There is no legal formatting, no clauses and no numbered subsections, which is deliberate: this is a policy customers will actually read.

Ten Trades, and the Words That Change With Them

The business type dropdown is not cosmetic. It swaps two words all the way through the policy, and both of them matter.

The first is what you call the thing being booked. A salon has appointments, a therapist has sessions, a studio has classes, a music or dance school has lessons, a medspa has treatments, and a trade has visits. A policy that talks about your appointment to somebody who booked a yoga class reads as though it came off a template, because it did.

The second is who the customer is being kept waiting by, which turns up in the running late paragraph. Your stylist, your clinician, your therapist, your practitioner, your instructor, your teacher, your vet, your tutor, or our engineer. That last one is the giveaway that somebody thought about the trades where you go to the customer rather than the other way round.

The cancellation policy generator does not carry every trade, so pick the closest match if yours is not listed. What you are choosing is a vocabulary, and the nearest vocabulary is nearly always right.

The Notice Window

Twenty four hours is the default and it is the right default for most trades, because it is long enough to refill a slot and short enough that customers do not feel trapped.

Longer suits work where the preparation is the cost: a treatment that needs a room set up, a home visit with a van and a route, anything where a cancelled morning cannot be replaced. Forty eight hours is common in those trades and nobody thinks it unreasonable.

Shorter suits anywhere with a waiting list, because a two hour gap you can fill from a message thread is not really a loss.

Set the notice to zero and the policy does not break. It rewrites itself into a version saying you can move or cancel at any time before it starts, which is a real position and a generous one, and it is still worth publishing so that people know it.

Percentage or a Fixed Amount

The toggle changes the sentence rather than just the number, so read the result of each before you decide.

A percentage scales with what was booked, which is fair where your prices vary a lot. Fifty per cent of a twenty pound trim and fifty per cent of a two hundred pound colour are proportionate to what you actually lost.

A fixed amount is easier to say out loud and easier to defend, and it suits a business where every appointment is worth roughly the same. It also has a practical advantage: a customer can work out what they owe without doing arithmetic, which removes an argument before it starts.

Whichever you pick, pick a number you would genuinely charge. A hundred per cent fee that everybody knows you never enforce is worse than a twenty per cent one you actually apply, because the first teaches people that your policy is decorative.

A Fee of Zero Is Still a Policy

Set the fee to nothing and the paragraph does not disappear. It changes into something better: cancel later than that, or not turn up at all, and there is nothing to pay, but we would still rather hear from you, because the slot can usually go to someone else.

That is the version a lot of small businesses should be publishing, and almost none of them do, because it does not feel like a policy. It is one. It sets an expectation, it explains the cost to somebody other than the customer, and it asks for the one thing you actually want, which is a message.

Most no-shows are not people avoiding a fee. They are people who forgot, or who felt awkward about cancelling late and dealt with the awkwardness by saying nothing. A policy that removes the penalty and keeps the ask gets more of those people to tell you.

The Running Late Paragraph Nobody Writes

Every policy covers cancellations. Almost none of them cover the far more common situation, which is somebody arriving fifteen minutes late with a genuine excuse and an expectation of the full hour.

The generated policy handles it in one paragraph: send a message, the slot is held as long as possible, and the person providing the service may have to shorten it so that the next customer is not kept waiting.

That sentence prevents more friction than the fee does. It is said in advance, it is obviously reasonable, and it puts the shortened appointment where it belongs, which is as a consequence of the lateness rather than as a decision your staff have to defend at the desk.

The Deposit Line, and When to Turn It On

The tick box adds a paragraph saying you take a deposit to hold the slot, that it comes off the price on the day, and that it is refunded in full if the customer cancels with the notice you asked for.

Those three facts are what make a deposit acceptable rather than resented. A deposit that vanishes is a fee. A deposit that comes off the bill and is returned when somebody gives notice is a genuine hold, and customers can tell the difference.

Only turn it on if you actually take one. A policy describing a deposit you do not collect is a promise to argue about later, and a customer who reads it and then is not asked for one has learned that your policy is not describing what you do.

What the Cancellation Policy Generator Cannot Do

It writes wording. That is the whole of it, and the limits follow.

• It is not legal advice. What you can charge, and when, depends on where you are and on consumer rules you did not write. If real money is involved regularly, get the wording checked by somebody local.
• A policy is not a contract on its own. It has force because the customer saw it and booked anyway. Written on a page nobody visited, it is a preference.
• It cannot take any money. No payments, no deposits, no card details. It describes a charge; collecting one is a separate problem.
• It does not know your trade’s rules. Regulated professions often have their own standards about fees and cancellations, and this has never heard of them.
• Nothing is stored. Copy the policy before you close the tab, because it is not saved anywhere.

The whole policy is written on the server before any script runs, so it is complete and copyable the moment the page loads. Changing an answer only rewrites it.

Where It Has to Appear

A policy works when the customer saw it before they booked, and it does almost nothing when they saw it afterwards. So the question is not what it says, it is where it is.

Three places, in order of how much they matter. On the page or the message where the booking is actually made, because that is the moment consent happens. In the confirmation, so there is a record they received it. And in the reminder, which is the last chance for somebody to cancel while it still costs you nothing.

If your bookings come through a list of services on a web page, paste the policy underneath it: the WhatsApp booking page generator builds that list. And the reminder is the place people most often forget, which the appointment reminder generator handles, including the line that offers somebody a way to move the appointment rather than skip it.

Charging It Is a Decision, Not a Setting

Most businesses write a fifty per cent fee and charge it about twice a year. That is not a failure of nerve, it is how a deterrent works: the policy does its job by being known, and the individual case is nearly always a judgement about whether you want to keep the customer.

What you cannot do is have that judgement in public. Charge one person and waive another in front of the same receptionist and you have a problem that is worse than the no-show.

The part that actually reduces no-shows is not the fee at all. It is that people are reminded and given an easy way out, and that they know in advance what the deal is. The no-show cost calculator puts a figure on both halves of that. With DMly the policy rides along with every booking confirmation and every reminder, which is the difference between having one and having one that anybody has read.