No-show cost calculator

Twenty Four Is Nothing. Seventeen Thousand Is Not.

Two hundred appointments a month with twelve per cent not turning up is twenty four empty slots, which is the sort of number an owner shrugs at because it happens a few at a time and never on the same day. Run it out for a year at a $60 ticket and it is 288 slots and $17,280, which is a different conversation entirely. The no-show cost calculator above does nothing cleverer than that. It takes a number you have stopped noticing and expresses it at the scale you actually budget at.

Those are the figures the panel opens on, so you can see the shape of it before you type anything of your own.

What the No-Show Cost Calculator Asks For

Four fields, and you probably know three of them without looking.

• Appointments a month. Opens on 200. What you book, not what you could book.
• Average ticket. Opens on 60. What one appointment is worth on the till.
• No-show rate. Opens on 12 per cent, and it steps in halves, because the difference between 12 and 12.5 is real money at this scale.
• Deposit per booking. Opens on 20. What you would ask for up front, if you asked.

Everything reprices as you type. Nothing is submitted, nothing is stored, and there is no step where you wait for an answer.

The Headline, and What It Is Counting

The big figure is the annual loss, with the two readings that make it real sitting underneath it: how many slots that is, and what it comes to in a month.

On the opening numbers that reads 288 empty slots and $1,440 a month. The monthly figure is the one worth looking at hardest, because it is the one you can hold up against things you already pay for without flinching.

Be clear about what it is, though. This is revenue that did not arrive, not profit you lost. The stock you did not use and the products you did not sell are not in it, and neither is the fact that your staff were paid for the hour regardless. For most appointment businesses the staff cost is the reason a no-show hurts more than the ticket suggests, so if anything the headline understates it.

Reminders: Roughly Thirty Per Cent

The first recovery row assumes a 24 hour reminder and a 2 hour reminder, and puts the recovery at about 30 per cent of the loss. On the opening figures that is $5,184 a year.

The note under it is the reason to trust the rest of the card: that is an estimate from typical results, not a promise. No panel can know your reminder open rate, your customers or your trade, and one that quoted a precise figure would be making it up.

What makes reminders work is not the reminder, it is the reply. A message that says do not forget is a notification. A message that asks you to confirm, or offers a way to move the appointment, gives somebody who was never going to come a way to say so while you can still fill the slot.

Deposits Do Two Things at Once

The second row is bigger than the first, at $10,368 on the opening figures, and it is worth seeing why, because the arithmetic is doing two separate jobs.

A deposit is assumed to stop about 40 per cent of no-shows, which on 288 slots recovers 115 of them at $60 each, or $6,912. Then, on the 173 people who still do not arrive, you keep the $20 you took, which is another $3,456. Add them and you get the $10,368 on the card.

That second half is the part people forget when they argue about deposits. Some of the money comes back because people turn up, and some comes back because they did not and you were not left with nothing.

Why Both Together Is Not Seventy Per Cent

Thirty and forty do not make seventy, and the panel says so on the row itself: the two overlap, so the combined figure is less than the rows above added together.

The arithmetic compounds rather than adds. Reminders stop 30 per cent, and the deposit then works on the 70 per cent that are left and stops 40 per cent of those, which lands the pair at 58 per cent rather than 70. On the opening figures that is $12,442.

The reason it has to work that way is obvious once you see it. The customer who was going to skip and got stopped by the reminder cannot also be stopped by the deposit. Adding the two rows would count that person twice, and a calculator that let you do that would be flattering rather than useful.

The Guardrails Built Into the Arithmetic

Two limits are written into the model and they are worth knowing, because they are what stop it drifting into a sales pitch.

A retained deposit is capped at the value of the slot it was held against. Set the deposit higher than the ticket and the model does not start pretending you profit from people not turning up.

And no recovery row can ever exceed the loss itself. Whatever combination of figures you type, the most the card will claim back is the money you were losing in the first place. That sounds obvious and it is exactly the sort of thing this kind of calculator normally gets wrong.

Where the Number Will Be Wrong for You

Four input problems, and all four are yours rather than the tool’s.

• The rate you quote is the one you remember. Most people guess their no-show rate from the bad weeks. Count a real month out of the diary before you trust the annual figure.
• A cancellation is not a no-show. Somebody who rings the day before and cancels gave you a chance to refill the slot. If you counted those in your rate, the loss is overstated.
• A refilled slot is not lost at all. If you have a waiting list and you fill gaps, some of what looks like loss is inconvenience rather than money.
• Seasonality. Twelve times a month is a straight line through a year that is not straight. It is still the right way to size the problem, just not a forecast.

None of these mean the number is useless. They mean it is an order of magnitude, and an order of magnitude is what you need to decide whether this is a problem worth spending an afternoon on.

What the No-Show Cost Calculator Cannot Know

It is four boxes and some arithmetic, and it has no view of your business at all.

• It does not read your diary. No booking system, no account, no import. Every figure is one you typed.
• The 30 and 40 per cent are estimates. They are reasonable, they are stated as estimates on the card itself, and they are not your numbers.
• It does not know your rebooking rate. A business that gets half its no-shows back in the same week has a smaller problem than this suggests.
• It cannot see the second order effects. A deposit changes who books at all, and that is not in here.
• Nothing is stored. Close the tab and the figures are gone.

The whole panel is computed on the server before any script runs, so the headline and all three recovery rows are already correct when the page appears.

The Deposit Question Nobody Wants to Ask

The deposit row is the biggest on the card, and it is also the one with a cost the card cannot show you.

Asking for money up front stops some people not turning up. It also stops some people booking. A first-time customer who is not sure yet, somebody booking on a Sunday evening, anybody who does not want to get their card out to make an appointment: some proportion of those simply do not book at all, and you never see them to count them.

Whether that trade is worth making depends on things no calculator knows. How busy you are, whether you have a waiting list, whether your no-shows are concentrated in first-time bookings or in regulars, and how much of your work comes from people deciding on the spur of the moment.

A reasonable middle path is to ask for something up front only where the loss is worst: long appointments, first-time customers, the peak slots you could have sold twice. That is a policy rather than a setting, and it wants writing down. The cancellation policy generator produces the wording for your trade, which is what makes a charge defensible when somebody argues about it.

Start With the Free Half

Of the two levers on this card, one costs you nothing and risks nothing. Reminders do not put anybody off booking, nobody has ever cancelled because they were reminded, and the recovery row says they are worth about a third of the loss on their own.

So do that first, measure it for a couple of months, and come back to the deposit question with your own numbers instead of an estimate. With DMly the 24 hour and 2 hour reminders go out automatically on WhatsApp, which is the version people actually read.

The wording matters more than the timing, and it is quick to get right: the appointment reminder generator writes the two messages for your trade, including the bit that lets somebody move an appointment instead of quietly not coming.