Confirming and approving bookings

Turn on approval for a programme, work the queue of bookings waiting on you, and know why that queue is not the same as a waitlist. Why a queue left alone fills your batches without filling your bank account.

3 min read

Which bookings wait for you

Some bookings arrive confirmed and some arrive wanting your say-so. Which is which comes down to the programme and to who made the booking.

Approval is set per programme. With it switched on, a booking a family makes for itself arrives awaiting confirmation. Bookings your staff take at the desk skip that queue and are confirmed on the spot — see Booking on a family's behalf.

Waitlisted bookings wait too, whether or not the programme needs approval. They sit there until a place frees up and you confirm them. Waitlists covers how they get onto the list in the first place.

A toggle labelled 'Is approval required to confirm bookings?' in the package details step — Turn this on and nothing confirms itself — every booking waits for you.

A booking waiting on you is already holding a place

This is the part that catches centres out. A booking awaiting confirmation takes its place in every session it covers from the moment the family makes it, exactly as a confirmed one does. A week of queue does not keep the batch open. It fills it quietly.

Cancelling releases those places immediately, and someone else can take them the same afternoon. Cancellations and refunds covers what happens to the invoice.

The 'Is approval required to confirm bookings?' toggle outlined in the package wizard — Turn this on and nothing confirms itself.

What confirming does

It does not change the places. Those were already held.

The booking becomes confirmed, with the time you confirmed it recorded against it
The family is notified and their confirmation is rebuilt — see Booking confirmations and PDFs
The invoice becomes a proper one with an invoice number, ready to be paid

Summary cards including a Confirmation Pending counter beside a Waitlisted Booking counter — Confirmation Pending is the list waiting on you. Waitlisted is the list waiting on a free place.

Confirming someone off the waitlist

A waitlisted booking usually has no invoice yet, because nothing is charged for a place that does not exist. Confirming raises the invoice at that point, priced as things stand now rather than as they stood when the family joined the list.

Their spot on the waitlist is given up at the same time, which matters where the waitlist has a capacity of its own: the next family can then join it.

The booking status column outlined — Bookings arrive needing a decision instead of going straight to Confirmed.

Confirming into a full session

You can confirm a waitlisted booking into a session that is already full. That is deliberate — it is how you fit in the extra child when you know the room takes them.

Nothing stops you at the line, though, and the way back is cancelling a booking you have already promised. Check the session first when the batch is anywhere near its limit.

The filter row outlined, including booking status — Filter by status to work only the ones waiting on you.

Keeping the queue short

Every booking waiting on you is a place held and an invoice not yet raised, which is money you cannot collect. Working through the queue daily costs less than reopening places later.

If a programme does not really need vetting, turn approval off for it. Bookings then confirm themselves, and the only thing left for you to decide is what to do about genuinely full sessions.

The Add Booking button outlined — Bookings you make yourself skip the queue.

Turning on approval for a programme

Approval is set per programme, on the first step of the programme setup, with a toggle asking whether approval is required to confirm bookings. Leave it off and bookings confirm themselves. Turn it on and every booking for that programme waits for a member of staff.

Use it where you need to check something a form cannot: a trial class where you want to talk to the family first, a level-based group where a child needs assessing, or a programme with limited spaces you would rather allocate yourself than hand to whoever books fastest.