How do I cancel a booking (and what happens to the deposit)?

Cancel a booking with an optional personal note, choose whether to refund or retain the deposit, and restore if you change your mind.

Open the booking and click Cancel on its action bar. What happens next depends on whether the customer paid a deposit. Cancelling needs the booking-cancel permission; refunding a deposit also needs the refund permission.

Cancelling a booking with no deposit

• Click Cancel. For a booking with a customer email, a pop-up titled Cancel this booking? appears with Add a personal note (optional, max 500 chars) — anything you type appears in the cancellation email to the customer.
• A confirmation dialog follows. When the customer can actually be reached, it shows a ticked Notify the customer by email / Notify the customer by text message / Notify the customer by email and text message box — the wording matches exactly which messages will send for this booking. Leave it ticked to notify the customer, or untick it to cancel silently.
• Click Confirm to cancel, or Go Back to back out.

If the customer can't be notified automatically — no email address or mobile number on file, or your cancellation notifications are switched off in Settings — the dialog says so plainly instead of promising a notification, and no notify box is shown. The booking moves to the Cancelled tab either way.

Cancelling a booking with a paid deposit

A Cancel Booking dialog appears with three choices:

• Cancel & Issue Refund — cancels and returns the deposit to the customer's card. You'll be asked to confirm your password (or approve with a manager's PIN where offered).
• Cancel & Retain Deposit — cancels and keeps the deposit. No password prompt, since no money moves.
• Go Back — changes nothing.

If the customer is already outside your refund policy (for example, past the refund cut-off, or under a no-refund policy), the refund button reads Refund deposit anyway — an explicit override.

This dialog carries the same ticked Notify the customer by … box as the plain cancel — untick it to cancel without messaging the customer. The deposit choice and the notify choice are independent: keeping or refunding the deposit works exactly the same either way.

A paid-in-full booking gets the same choice with honest wording — the dialog says the booking "was paid in full", and the buttons read Refund payment anyway / Cancel & Retain Payment.

If the booking or its payments change while cancellation is being confirmed, ResoFlow stops that request and asks you to review the latest details before confirming again. This protects your refund or retain choice from a payment arriving at the same moment. Guests cancelling online also review the amount still held after any earlier refunds; if that amount changes, they must confirm the updated warning.

Original terms and payment reviews

Changing today’s refund settings does not rewrite the terms already agreed for a confirmed booking. ResoFlow uses the structured original agreement when it can verify it. It keeps any valid booking hold’s agreed terms too.

A booking made before ResoFlow began recording the agreed terms (8 September 2026) carries no record to verify, so it is handled exactly as it always was: its refund, its cancellation deadline and any fee follow the venue's current settings, and it never needs a review. For a booking whose recorded terms cannot be verified, a guest can still cancel immediately. The request time is recorded and only the uncertain money goes to Booking payment reviews. A booking with no outstanding money and no possible saved-card fee does not need a financial review. ResoFlow does not guess a fee, a refund or a forfeiture from old policy prose or from a record it cannot verify.

Staff with booking-refund permission can open the review from the booking’s details or Payments → Booking payment reviews. Check the original policy record if available, or document an agreement with the guest. Use the existing Refund… control to return any agreed amount, then refresh the amounts. Record the reason and agreement reference before confirming exactly how much remains retained. Closing the review records the settlement; it does not move money or replace the original policy. Any uncertain fee is waived. A payment operation still processing must be reconciled before the review can close.

If another person changes the booking or payment, your notes stay in the review and you must refresh and check the new amounts before saving again.

Switching off fee collection prevents the corresponding fee under the existing operational rules. Turning off the fee alone does not remove an established ordinary online-cancellation deadline. Losing the plan’s booking-rule feature keeps the existing rule that removes that online deadline. Neither change increases an agreed fee or substitutes today’s refund policy for the original one.

Restoring a cancelled booking

Open the cancelled booking and click Restore. It returns to confirmed if its tables are still available. If the original place is now occupied, ResoFlow offers suitable tables or times within the next two hours of that service, keeping the party size and duration. Your selection is checked again before restoring; if nothing suitable is offered, keep the booking unchanged and edit its date, time or tables first. If the deposit (or full payment) was refunded when it was cancelled, the pop-up warns that it won't be re-charged and points you at Request payment on the booking — send the customer a payment link if you need to collect it again.

Cancel vs delete

Walk-ins and waitlist entries (including self-service waitlist joins) show Delete instead of Cancel — they never received a booking confirmation, so deleting removes the entry without sending the customer anything. Cancelling keeps the record in the Cancelled tab and can notify the customer.

Declining a pending online request works the same way as cancelling — see the pending-bookings guide.

Related: When do customers get their deposit back? · How do payment links work? · How do I approve or decline online booking requests? · How do I mark a no-show (and charge the fee)? · How do approvals with a manager's PIN work?