Deposits

A deposit is part of the total, never on top of it. A £100 deposit on a £500 booking means £100 now and £400 later, not £600 — and the screens say so out loud, because charging twice is the mistake this is easy to make.

You do not tell us which payment is the deposit. The first money in counts towards it, so a £100 bank transfer settles a £100 deposit on its own. That also means a refund can reopen one: money that has come back is money owed again, and a deposit shown as paid when it has been returned is how a group arrives having paid nothing.

A deposit can be set before anything has been priced — “£100 to hold the dates, we will price it when we know numbers” is an ordinary way to take a booking, and that £100 is chaseable straight away. What a deposit cannot be is larger than the total; if you lower a total below an existing deposit you are asked to change the deposit first.

Three optional rules sit under Deposits on the Prices page. All three start off.

A percentage you usually ask for. Set 20% and the deposit box offers £132 on a £660 booking, which you can overtype. It only ever suggests: what gets stored is still pounds. That matters more than it sounds — a deposit kept as a percentage would follow the total when you re-price a booking, and a group who had already paid the old figure would suddenly be short or over through nobody’s doing.

Wait for the deposit before confirming. With this on, a booking whose deposit is unpaid stays provisional, and the refusal says how much is outstanding rather than just refusing. This is the one rule in the product that binds you and not just the website, and that is deliberate: everything else warns you because we imposed it, whereas you asked for this one, so a warning you click past would be no use.

Cancelling a provisional booking whose deposit goes unpaid. Think about this one before switching it on. A booking that cancels itself because nobody chased £50 is a worse outcome than one sitting overdue on the Owed page, where you can see it — you lose a booking you would have kept and find out from the diary. If you do want it, it has four guards:

• The group is emailed first, roughly halfway through the fuse, saying what will happen and when.
• Nothing is cancelled unless that email actually went. Not was due to go — went. If you have no email set up, nothing is ever cancelled.
• Confirmed bookings are never touched, whatever the deposit is doing. Only provisional ones.
• Seven days is the shortest fuse. Anything quicker should be done by hand, by somebody who can see whose booking it is.

Every automatic cancellation is recorded in the activity log and the group is emailed to say the dates have been released — and that email asks them to get in touch if it is a mistake, because a released booking can be un-released.