Approvals, holds and cancellation requests

Work the Needs Action tab, understand the four auto-approval hold gates, and approve or reject customer and staff 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 tab

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.

Auto-approval holds

Bookings that come in clean can auto-confirm. Four independent gates hold a booking for review instead — and every gate defaults to on. 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.
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.

Explained disabled states

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 requests

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:

Click the pet's name to open the booking if you need the full picture.
Choose Approve or Reject.
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.
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 period

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:

Open the booking and click the Request cancel tile (it replaces Cancel once the booking is inside the notice period).
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.
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.