Approvals, holds and cancellation requests

Not every booking should confirm itself. Wagday holds bookings that trip a safety gate for staff review, and customers who cancel through the portal wait for your decision. Both queues sit on the Bookings page.

The Needs Action tabCopy Anchor Link

Bookings → Needs Action lists every booking still waiting on you: anything Pending (booked but not confirmed) or Awaiting Payment. The tab carries a live count badge, so you can see the queue length from any bookings view.

Held bookings land here too — a booking that tripped one of the hold gates below stays Pending until someone reviews and confirms it.

Turn on automatic booking approvalCopy Anchor Link

Automatic approval is off by default for each location. An Owner or Admin can open the location's edit form in Settings, turn on Enable automatic booking approval, then select Save Changes. Repeat for each location where you want eligible bookings to confirm automatically. Turn the switch off and save to keep the existing manual approval behaviour.

Enabling this switch does not bypass safety checks. The location's physical capacity hard ceiling and, with the default staffing hold enabled, its staff-to-pet ratio must both pass. Capacity-full bookings never auto-confirm. Insufficient staffing holds bookings for review with the default settings; enabling automatic approval does not change the staffing hold or the location's over-capacity policy. The vaccination, danger-alert and payment holds below still apply. A failure to read settings holds the booking rather than assuming approval is allowed.

Auto-approval holdsCopy Anchor Link

Bookings that come in clean can auto-confirm. Four gates you can switch hold a booking for review instead — and every gate defaults to on. More holds below always apply. If your settings ever can't be read, Wagday fails safe and holds rather than auto-confirming.

Only Admins can change these, at Settings → Policies → Auto-Approval Holds:

• Hold on vaccination non-compliance — don't auto-approve when the pet's vaccinations aren't current. (Applies under Advisory or Acknowledge vaccination policies; a Hard Block policy stops the booking entirely, upstream.)
• Hold on customer danger alert — never auto-approve a booking for a customer with an active danger alert.
• Hold on insufficient staffing — don't auto-approve when the projected pets for that day would exceed your staff-to-pet ratio for the rostered team. If no roster is published for the date, this gate passes — rosters are short-horizon, so a future date without a roster is normal. At a location with staffing call-ins switched on, a held booking starting more than 24 hours away waits for a call-in shift instead, with its own answer-by time: see Staffing call-ins.
• Hold paid-but-flagged bookings for review — when an online payment lands on a booking that didn't auto-approve, the booking is held as paid-but-pending rather than force-confirmed on the money path. The customer is told their payment was received; the confirmation only goes out when staff actually confirm.

Leave the gates on unless you have a specific reason — each one exists because the fully automatic path missed something a human should see.

These holds have no switch and always apply:

• New customers — a customer's first booking always waits for review.
• Temperament — a pet that isn't green is held. The exception is an orange pet booked for daycare, which can auto-confirm; an orange pet booked for boarding is held.
• Missing behaviour assessment — when your business requires an assessment and the pet hasn't completed one.
• Transport capacity — when a booking needs transport and the location's vehicle can't take it, or no vehicle capacity is set up.
• Pen availability — when the spaces look full for the stay (see below).

Card on file is another hold with no switch. If Require card on file is on (Settings → Policies) and no payment provider is connected, customers can't save a card online, so their portal and app bookings are held with the reason Card on file required whatever these gates say. Arrange a card with the customer, then approve the booking. See No-show and late cancellation charges.

At a location with spaces set up, a booking is also held when the spaces look full for its stay, with the reason Pen availability requires review. Wagday counts the free places for the stay:

• Each space has room for its capacity, less the most pets in it at any one moment of the stay.
• A space holding a pet with a CRITICAL behaviour risk has no room, because nobody may share it.
• Bookings that don't have a space yet, including ones waiting for approval or payment, will each need one, so they take a free place first.
• A request for several pets needs a place for each.

The hold only asks a person to look: placing each pet in a space still runs its own checks.

Explained disabled statesCopy Anchor Link

When a booking sits inside the cancellation notice period, the Reschedule tile on the booking page is disabled but explains itself — hover it (or focus it with the keyboard) and it reads "Within the N-hour notice period", where N is the location's notice period. The Cancel tile doesn't go dead either: it switches to Request cancel and opens the staff request flow below.

Customer cancellation requestsCopy Anchor Link

When a customer asks to cancel through the portal, the request queues on the Bookings page — the Pending cancellation requests card appears on both the Today and Needs Action tabs, oldest request first.

Each row shows the pet and customer, the booking's date and location, when they asked, and their reason if they gave one. Only Managers and above can action requests — other staff see the queue but the buttons are disabled:

1. Click the pet's name to open the booking if you need the full picture.
2. Choose Approve or Reject.
3. Approving cancels the booking and issues whatever refund the cancellation policy allows. Watch the confirmation message: it tells you whether the refund was issued, is queued, or must be processed manually — a manual refund leaves a persistent warning on the card until you act on it, because no money has moved yet.
4. Rejecting leaves the booking in place.

The notice period that decides whether a cancellation is free or late is set per location (24 hours by default, in the location's settings). The fees themselves come from your organisation-wide cancellation policy — see No-show and late-cancel charges.

Staff cancellation requests inside the notice periodCopy Anchor Link

Sometimes a booking genuinely has to come off the schedule inside the notice period — a sick dog, a no-show pickup. Staff can't cancel it directly, but they can ask a manager to approve it:

1. Open the booking and click the Request cancel tile (it replaces Cancel once the booking is inside the notice period).
2. The dialog confirms the booking is inside the notice period, that a manager must approve the request, and that a late-cancel fee may apply. Add the reason and submit.
3. The booking stays confirmed until a manager decides — nothing is cancelled yet.

The request lands in the same Pending cancellation requests card on the Bookings page, badged Staff request — Taylor Smith so reviewers can tell it apart from a portal request. Approving it cancels the booking exactly as a portal request would, including any late-cancel fee the policy allows. Managers can't approve their own request — another manager has to review it (Admins are the escape hatch for single-manager facilities). If a change request is already pending on the booking, or a cancellation request is already in the queue, the dialog refuses the duplicate.

Direct cancellation inside the notice period still isn't possible for anyone — the reviewed request is the only in-window route, so no one bypasses the fee and audit trail by cancelling themselves.

Approving a change of timeCopy Anchor Link

Managers and above review change requests in Scheduling → Requests, within their location access. Approval keeps the customer's booking instructions and checks that the new time is still available.

If the move costs more, the original booking stays in place while the customer pays the difference. The confirmation says Move waiting for payment. Open the booking and get the pay link promptly. Agreeing to a higher price is not payment.

If the move costs less, Wagday reduces the bill with a credit note and plans any refund to the original payment method. Before approving, you can select The customer asked to keep any refund from this move as account credit only when the customer has explicitly asked for that. It starts unchecked for every request. Your identity, the time and the amount retained are recorded with the move. Rejecting a request never changes its money.

The same choice is available in the booking's Reschedule dialog and resets when you close it. It applies only when this move completes at a lower price, and does not change a refund that is already underway. A separate confirmation may still be needed if the price has increased since the customer requested the change.

RelatedCopy Anchor Link

• Booking statuses, check-in rules and payments
• Creating and managing bookings
• Booking cut-offs and date blocking