Appointment statuses, cancellations and no-shows
Updated
On this page
Every appointment sits in one of six statuses: Pending, Confirmed, In Progress, Completed, Cancelled or No Show. On the calendar's status filter, Pending is labelled Unconfirmed.
Moving an appointment forward
The buttons you see depend on where the appointment is:
- Pending — Confirm or Cancel
- Confirmed — Start or Cancel
- In Progress — Complete
- Completed, Cancelled, No Show — no forward action; these are end states
Two guards catch people out:
- You cannot confirm an appointment that has no staff member assigned.
- You cannot start a grooming appointment until the grooming card is filled in. The error lists exactly what is missing.
Complete opens the completion screen so you can add retail products to the visit before closing it out.
Undoing a status change
Business owners, and anyone granted the "undo status changes" permission, get reverse actions: Undo Check-In (back to Confirmed), Reopen (a completed appointment back to In Progress), Undo No-Show and Reinstate (a cancelled appointment back to Confirmed).
Reopen disappears once the appointment has been paid — reopening paid work would desynchronise the invoice.
Cancelling
Cancelling always asks for a reason: client requested, client no-show, staff unavailable, scheduling conflict, weather, pet illness, emergency, or other, plus optional detail. The reason is what makes the Cancellation and No-Show report useful.
When an appointment is cancelled, Alaga automatically looks at the waitlist for that slot and offers it to waiting clients. See Using the waitlist.
Cancellation fees apply to reservations, not appointments. The Cancellation Policy under Business Settings, Facility Settings governs boarding and daycare cancellations. Cancelling an appointment does not charge a fee.
No-shows
Two routes:
- Automatically. Every 30 minutes Alaga looks for appointments still marked Confirmed whose end time passed more than 30 minutes ago, and flips them to No Show.
- By hand. Edit the appointment and set the status to No Show.
There is no separate "mark no-show" button — it is a status like any other.
Recurring series
An appointment that is part of a series gets a Series menu with: modify the recurrence schedule, confirm this and all future appointments, cancel future appointments, or cancel this and all future. Changing one occurrence on its own is just a normal edit.