No-show and late cancellation fees, recorded not charged

Some systems say they "automatically charge no-shows". That means they keep your patients' card details on file and take money from them without anyone at your clinic being involved.

Velvet Lead deliberately does not keep patients' card details. So the fee is recorded against the visit, a deposit already paid can be kept against it, and anything more is settled at your clinic however you already take payment. That is the honest version, and in our experience it is also the reassuring one: no patient has ever been pleased to discover a clinic can charge their card at will.

A fee only works if the patient agreed to it while they still had a choice. The wording you write is shown during booking, in the same flow where they pick their time and enter their details.

That single change removes most of the awkward conversations. When a patient misses an appointment, your team is referring back to something the patient read, rather than introducing a rule at the worst possible moment.

An example of a clinic's own wording, once one has written one we can show: {{FEE_POLICY_EXAMPLE}}

For the treatments where a missed appointment really hurts, a booking deposit is the strongest tool you have. The patient pays it on Stripe's secure page when they book, through your own Stripe account.

If they then miss the appointment, the deposit is simply not refunded, and the fee it covers is recorded against the visit. No card is charged after the fact, because the money already moved when the patient chose to commit.

A fee is what is left after everything else has failed. Most missed appointments are forgotten ones, which is why the practical work of reducing no-shows happens earlier: reminders by email and WhatsApp, a self-cancel link in every confirmation, and unconfirmed requests that expire on their own.

Pair fees with the waiting list and a late cancellation stops being pure loss. The patient cancels through their link, the fee is recorded, the slot is released, and the people waiting for that exact treatment hear about it within minutes.

Every recorded fee sits on the visit it came from, next to the booking's status and history, so your team can see what happened and when. Missed appointments and late cancellations are already counted in reports by day, treatment and practitioner.

Before holding a valuable time, your front desk can also check a patient's own record for completed visits, missed ones and late cancellations over the past year. It is written as a note, never a judgement: people have hard years, and the decision about what to do with that stays with your team.