Deposits, cancellations and no-shows: a policy you can copy

A no-show costs you the whole session and half your morning.

You held the slot. You prepared. You turned down someone else who wanted it. You showed up. And now you're standing in an empty room, and the question is whether you say anything — because saying something feels petty, and saying nothing feels like being taken for granted.

Most coaches say nothing, most of the time. And that silence is the actual problem, because it teaches people that your time has no cost.

Here's a policy you can copy, the reasoning behind each part, and — the part most articles skip — when you should deliberately ignore your own policy.

Why "no policy" is itself a policy

If you've never written down what happens when someone cancels late or doesn't show, you haven't avoided having a policy. You've chosen the worst one: it depends on my mood and how awkward I feel that day.

That's bad for you because it's unpredictable income. It's bad for the student because it's unfair — the confident parent who pushes gets let off, the polite one who apologises gets charged, and neither of them did anything different. And it's bad for the relationship because every single cancellation becomes a fresh negotiation, and negotiations are tiring.

A written policy isn't about being strict. It's about not having to decide, in the moment, while you're annoyed. The policy does the deciding so you don't have to have the argument.

The three things a policy needs to cover

Keep it to three. More than three and nobody reads it, including you.

1. The cancellation window — how much notice you need for a cancellation to be free.

2. What happens inside the window — late cancellation and no-show.

3. Deposits — whether, and when, you take money upfront.

That's the whole thing. Everything else is decoration.

The template

Adapt the numbers — they're defaults, not commandments. But keep the shape, because the shape is what makes it fair and enforceable.

Cancellations and missed sessions

Life happens, and I'll always try to be reasonable. Here's how it works so we both know where we stand.

More than 24 hours' notice: no charge. We'll reschedule to a slot that suits us both, or credit the session.

Less than 24 hours' notice: the session is charged in full. I've held the time and can't usually fill it at short notice.

No-show: the session is charged in full.

If something genuinely serious comes up — illness, a family emergency — talk to me. I'd always rather sort it out than stick rigidly to a rule.

Five short lines and one human sentence at the end. That last line matters more than the rest, and we'll come back to why.

Why 24 hours

It's long enough to usually refill or rearrange the slot, and short enough to feel reasonable to the person cancelling. Twelve hours rarely gives you time to do anything with the gap. Forty-eight starts to feel punitive for normal life.

If you teach children whose parents cancel for illness often — younger kids get sick a lot — you might soften this to same-day-before-a-cutoff rather than a hard 24. If you're at full capacity with a waiting list, you can afford to be firmer, because a cancelled slot is a gift to someone else. Set it to your reality.

Why "charged in full," not a partial fee

Half-charging is a trap. It signals that the slot was only half-real, invites haggling over the other half, and complicates your invoicing for very little gain. Full or free is cleaner to state, cleaner to bill, and cleaner to hold. The window is where you're generous; inside the window, the answer is simple.

Why a no-show is the same as a late cancellation

Because from your side they're identical — an empty slot you can't refill — and treating a no-show more harshly than a 30-minute-warning cancellation just rewards people for warning you at the last second instead of not warning you at all. Same outcome, same charge.

On deposits

Deposits are a separate decision, and most coaches don't need them. You need one only if you have a specific problem:

• New students who no-show their first session. A trial deposit — refundable against the first session if they turn up — filters out the people who book on a whim and vanish. This is the single most useful place for a deposit.

• Group classes or blocks with high demand, where an unclaimed spot means someone else missed out.

• A history of being burned by a particular pattern you can name.

If none of those apply, don't add deposits. They're friction at the exact moment you're trying to get a "yes," and friction at the point of booking costs you more starts than it saves you no-shows. Solve the problem you have, not the one you're imagining.

If you do take one, one line covers it:

Booking a trial: a small deposit holds your slot and comes straight off your first session. If you can't make it, just give me 24 hours' notice and I'll refund it in full.

The part every strict-policy article gets wrong

Here's where most advice fails you.

Having a firm policy and deliberately breaking it for the right person is not a contradiction. It's the entire advantage you have over a big franchised centre. A chain enforces its cancellation policy uniformly because it has to — it has no relationship to protect and no discretion to exercise. You do.

When the parent who has never once been late has a genuinely awful week, and you wave the late-cancellation charge — that costs you one session and buys you years of loyalty. That's not you being soft. That's you spending a small, deliberate amount of goodwill on someone who will remember it. It's the best-value marketing you'll ever do.

The trick is that this only works because you have a firm default. If your policy is already mushy, waiving the charge means nothing — there was nothing to waive. The firmness is what makes the exception land as generosity rather than as your normal chaos.

So: firm policy, held consistently, broken on purpose, for people who've earned it, when it's genuinely deserved. Never because someone pushed hard. The person who argues their way out of the charge should be the least likely to succeed, not the most — otherwise you've taught your students that complaining pays.

This is also, for what it's worth, why we're careful about how software touches this. A tool should apply your policy by default and get out of the way the instant you say "not this one." The discretion has to stay yours. The moment a system enforces the policy uniformly on your behalf, it's quietly stripped you of the one advantage the policy was supposed to protect.

How to introduce it without it being awkward

Three rules.

State it once, upfront, when someone joins — not for the first time when you're trying to charge someone. A policy that appears only at the moment of enforcement reads as a trap. A policy stated on day one reads as professionalism.

Put it in writing where it can be found again — a pinned message, your booking page, a line in your welcome note. Not so you can wave it at people, but so nobody can honestly say they didn't know.

Say it plainly and move on. The more you over-explain and apologise for having a policy, the more it sounds like something to be negotiated. "Here's how cancellations work, let me know if you've any questions" is confident. Three paragraphs of justification is not.

What actually changes when you have one

The late cancellations don't vanish. What changes is that you stop absorbing them silently, stop deciding case-by-case while annoyed, and stop feeling taken for granted — because now there's a rule, everyone knew the rule, and the rule is fair.

And on the rare occasion you break it for someone who deserves it, that generosity actually registers — because it's visibly an exception to something real, not just more of your usual reluctance to charge anyone for anything.

That reluctance, by the way, is the thing this whole article is really about. Most coaches don't have a no-show problem. They have a charging problem, and the no-shows are just where it shows up.

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