Deposits, to reduce no-shows

1. What a deposit does

When Deposit required is switched on, your booking page collects card details and charges the deposit before the booking is confirmed. It's a real charge to the customer's card, made straight into your own Stripe account, not a hold that just checks the card works.

What happens to that money afterwards depends entirely on your cancellation window, covered below. It's either refunded automatically or kept, according to your own policy.

2. Turning it on

• Go to Settings, then Booking rules, and open the Deposits & no-show protection tab.
• Connect and verify Stripe first, from the Stripe connection card at the top of that tab. You can't save a deposit policy until your Stripe account can actually take payments.
• Under Deposits & no-show protection, choose Deposit required (the other two options are No deposit and Card on file).
• Set your amount or percentage, and your refund window, in the fields that appear.
• Click Save Deposit Policy.

3. How the amount is calculated

• A fixed amount: a flat figure you type in, in your own currency.
• A percentage of the booking's total (appointment businesses only): a share of the price of the service booked. Setting this to 100 charges the full price upfront, effectively a pay-in-full option. This isn't available for restaurants and venues, since a table booking has no single total price to take a share of, so they use a fixed amount instead.
• Per-person vs a flat amount (restaurants and venues only): a flat amount charges the same regardless of party size; per-person multiplies your amount by the number of guests.
• A minimum party size (restaurants and venues only): set this so small bookings aren't charged a deposit at all, for example only parties of 6 or more.

4. The refund window

Set "Free cancellation up to" a number of hours before the booking. Cancel with more notice than that and the deposit is refunded automatically. Cancel with less notice, or don't show up, and the deposit is kept. That's not a failure, it's the deposit doing exactly what it's there for.

The window only applies when the customer cancels. When you cancel a booking from your dashboard, the deposit is refunded in full, whatever the window says. If the customer asked you to cancel for them, an admin can tick "Keep the deposit" in the cancel dialog.

Setting the window to 0 hours means a deposit is never refunded automatically. Team members can still refund one by hand at any time, from Payments (see the article on refunding a payment).

5. Who can change the policy

Only admin accounts can change deposit settings by default. An admin can turn on "Let staff edit this deposit policy" to let any staff member change the amount, the refund window and who pays, not just admins. This is off by default.

6. Costs and availability

Deposits and the card-on-file no-show fee are the same feature under the hood, so they're priced the same way: included at no extra cost from Growth and Venue Growth up, and an add-on for A$14.99 a month on Solo and Venue Starter. Taking payments isn't part of the free trial.

A customer is never asked to pay a deposit unless your Stripe account is fully connected and able to take payments right now. Until then, bookings confirm the ordinary way with no payment step, so a temporary Stripe issue never blocks a booking.