Completing an appointment

Open the appointment on your calendar and choose Mark as Complete from its menu. That closes the booking off: the request moves to your Completed tab and your client's project shows as finished in their hub. Changed your mind, or tapped it on the wrong booking? Unmark as Complete in the same menu puts everything back.

You can only complete an appointment on the day it happens or after. Try it on a future booking and Maelo tells you which date it unlocks. That guard is there so a mis-tap cannot quietly retire work you have not done yet.

If you never get round to it, Maelo does it for you. A booking tidies itself away one day after its last session, at midnight in your timezone. Nothing is emailed to anyone when that happens, so you can safely ignore this whole screen and still keep a clean inbox.

Take Payment on the appointment, or Collect Payment on the request, opens the same panel. At the top it works out what is left: Appointment cost, plus any tax, minus Deposit paid, giving you the Balance due. Every one of those numbers is editable on the spot, so a piece that ran long is a tap to fix.

Underneath, Payment Options lists how you can take it.

• •Tap to Pay takes a contactless card on your own phone.
• •Charge Card on File reuses the card that paid the deposit, once you confirm the client authorised it.
• •Pay by Card emails them a link and puts a pay button on their booking page, with a QR code you can hold up at the counter.
• •Your own methods, such as bank transfer or an e-transfer, show the details to copy.
• •Mark as Paid records cash or anything else you settled off Maelo.

Which of your own methods appear is up to you in Settings, Payments, Final Payments, along with your tax rate. Maelo takes nothing at all from a final payment. Each option is covered in more depth in final payments.

An appointment that has passed with no final payment logged shows No final payment recorded in amber, and your calendar carries a count of every booking in that state. It is the one thing worth chasing, so Maelo keeps it in front of you rather than in a report.

Once you have completed one that way, the note softens to No payment logged, and Take Payment is still there. You can record the money later and it counts properly.

When you record a payment through Mark as Paid, there is a Tip (optional) box under the amount. Put the cash tip in there and it is counted in your earnings alongside the payment itself.

If the payment carried a tip or tax, the receipt your client gets breaks them out on their own lines, so nobody has to work backwards from one total.

Someone who never turns up gets handled as a cancellation with a reason. Cancel the session and pick No-Show. That frees the slot and puts the incident on that client's compliance record, dated to the appointment they missed, so a pattern is visible next time they book. The label itself is for you, and your client never sees it.

You can also charge for it. Where no-show fees are switched on for your account and the client's card was saved when they paid their deposit, that session offers Charge No-Show Fee. You confirm you have the cardholder's permission first, and charging it cancels the request at the same time.

Charging for a no-show only holds up if the client agreed to it when they booked, which is why the fee adds a clause to your booking waiver saying their card may be charged. Get that in place before you rely on it.

Completing a booking does not email anyone. It adds a line to your client's hub saying their project is complete, and their page switches to Completed with a history of every session they sat for. Un-completing sends nothing either.

Money is different. Take a payment in person, in cash or by tap, and Maelo emails them a receipt showing the subtotal, any tax, any tip and the total with its currency named. Pay by card online and Stripe sends its own receipt instead.

Request a payment with Pay by Card and they get an email asking for the balance with a button straight to the payment, plus the same button on their booking page until it is paid.