Using the Automator, you can setup actions to automatically charge a customer if they cancel late or if they do not show up for an event.
Please note, you may already have a financial penalty in place and should check your configured refund rule. Read more about configurations here.
Use Case
More often than not, brands who offer unlimited memberships want to ensure there is actually a penalty for customers who book but end up not attending.
In this case, we would recommend using the Automator.
If a customer booked with a subscription which only gives them a certain number of bookings or with a credit, then it may be acceptable to just follow the refund rule which may mean they don't get that booking or credit back.
Setup Your Late Cancel/No Show Product
The Automator works by charging customers for a certain product.
Therefore, first setup a new product and create two variants:
1. Late Cancellation Fee
2. No Show Fee
First, create a product. Name it something like, "Late/No Show Fees."
The first time you set it up, you'll type in a price. You can adjust this after.
Then after you click create, you'll be able to edit the variant(s). Edit the "default" variant to name it "No Show Fee."
Then create another variant on that product called "Late Fee."
If you charge the same fee, then you only need to edit the variant name to change it to something like "Late/No Show Fee."
See the video guide below for how to follow this:
How to Setup An Automator to Automatically Charge A Late Cancellation Fee
Your CodexFit system will have a cancellation period already enabled (usually 12 or 24 hours). Therefore, if someone cancels within this window of time, the Automator event "Customer Late Cancellation" will fire.
This event will happen at the same time the customer cancels.
We recommend only doing this if the customer has an unlimited plan.
See the screenshot of an Automator below:
The above Automator will only charge customers if the Subscription Name used on the booking contains "unlimited" in its title. You can do this or you can setup multiple custom conditions each for the different subscriptions which should trigger this. If you setup multiple custom conditions, then make sure you select "or" so the automator triggers for any customers who is on one of those subscriptions.
How to Setup An Automator to Automatically Charge No Show Fee
The setup is almost identical to the late cancellation. You can just select a different product. But if you have the same fee for late cancellation then feel free to add the same things.
This event will happen between 2-4AM each morning for the events which took place the day before. It is important you ensure FOH are taking attendance accurately to avoid automatically charging customers these fees.
However, please note that you can also add an action to add a customer note to their account. This could be useful to track how often this happens. Please see that additional action below in use:
Considerations
- Customers can only be charged if they have a card stored on file. If they don't, the charge will fail.
- Customers may be required to complete SCA authentication. If this is required in the country which you operate, customers will be sent an email with a link to authorise the charge. Therefore, customers may opt not to authorise the charge. You can either download the order lines report to find which customers had failed charges for the particular late cancel/no show product you've setup or you could also run either the late cancellations or no shows report.