Appointments

This standard governs appointments in the customer record system: the status vocabulary, the list and enriched view, booking at the desk, the Needs Attention workflow, the waitlist, and the money rules for deposits and fees. It applies to front desk staff, who book and move appointments, and to managers, who configure the booking rules that set deposits and fees. Every appointment the business owns is in this registry, whether it came from the website booking process, the front desk, or another system entry. If an appointment exists in the older booking records but not in this registry, check the email; no email means no registry row, with no exceptions, under Customers.

The status vocabulary

Appointment status is a fixed vocabulary. Staff shall think of the values as a pipeline, not as labels

• Precheck: the booking arrived but is not confirmed yet.
• Deposit paid: money is down and the slot is held.
• Scheduled: on the books. This is also the fallback for anything the booking carry-over does not recognize, so a scheduled appointment with a same-day start time deserves a glance.
• Assigned: a groomer is attached.
• Waiting check-in: the customer is expected; the dog is not on the table yet.
• Confirmed: the customer confirmed.
• Checked in: the dog is in the building.
• In service: on the table, work happening.
• Hold: paused, not cancelled. Use it when the customer calls mid-day to push by an hour; it keeps the appointment on the board without losing its history.
• Completed: done. This is a money status: completing an appointment fires commission accrual for the groomer, under Appointment Detail.
• No-show: the customer did not come. This is also a money status: marking no-show fires the no-show fee machinery, producing a real invoice, never a silent charge.
• Cancelled: cancelled. Inside the cutoff window, this fires the cancellation fee the same way.
• Rescheduled: moved. The history records the transition; the new appointment carries on.

Every transition writes a status history entry: from, to, reason, and the originating booking reference: and an audit entry. Nothing about an appointment's past is editable; the history is append-only by design, because when a customer disputes a no-show fee, the history is the evidence.

The list and the enriched view

The plain appointment list returns the appointment records themselves, which carry no names. Pet, service, groomer, and location names live on the linked records. The list views staff actually use present the enriched form: customer name, email, and phone; pet names and breed; service names; groomer name; location name; the money figures (total, amount paid, deposit amount, outstanding amount, subtotal, tax total); and the communication timestamps for pickup notification, payment processed, and thank-you messages: the communications audit trail.

Two warnings apply

• The stored outstanding amount is not trusted. Records can show zero there while amount paid is also zero. The Needs Attention feed computes total minus amount paid itself for exactly this reason. Staff reconciling shall do the subtraction rather than reading the stored figure.
• Service type confirmed and payment method confirmed are the confirmation flags. An appointment can be confirmed with an unconfirmed service type: the slot was confirmed but not what will be done: and that state is worth a call before the dog arrives.

Booking an appointment at the desk

When an appointment is created, the pet and service selections are not part of the appointment record itself. The system creates the appointment row, then writes the link rows: one pet link, and one service link per service, with the price taken from the service's default price at that moment. The price snapshot matters: if the service price changes next week, this appointment keeps the price it was booked at.

If the linking fails, the system reports the failure plainly and names the appointment. The appointment exists without its links. Staff shall not create it again; fix the link: usually a wrong service identifier or a service record belonging to another location's records: and re-attach. Creating it again mints a duplicate appointment number and leaves two records for one dog.

Needs Attention: the morning triage

The same four signals as the dashboard, in CRM Dashboard, read here as a workflow

1. Unpaid balance: take payment or send the reminder. Do this first; it is revenue.
2. Unsigned document: collect at check-in or send for signature now.
3. Vaccination expiring: request the record before the visit. An expired vaccination at the door is a turned-away customer and a lost slot.
4. No-show history: confirm the appointment and collect the deposit before the visit.

Staff shall work the feed top to bottom every morning. Because the feed is derived from the underlying conditions, clearing a condition clears the row; there is no separate "mark done" step and no stale rows to clean up.

The waitlist

The waitlist is a real queue, not a notepad. Each entry carries the customer, pet, service, location, preferred groomer, a priority, the requested time window, and an expiry. Only entries in waiting or offered state are shown; booked means converted, cancelled means removed. When a slot opens, staff shall work the waitlist by priority and requested window, and convert the entry rather than booking fresh. Conversion keeps the history: who waited, how long, and what they wanted: which is how the business learns whether the waitlist is working.

Deposits, fees, and the money rules

Deposits and cancellation and no-show fees are set by each location's booking rules, stored as its configuration and read at the time the fee is applied. The discipline is strict

• No stored rule, no fee. An unset or zero rule means no fee is charged. A settings screen may display starting values in its form, but only what the location actually saved is applied. Staff shall never promise a customer a fee that is not configured, and never assume one exists.
• Fees become invoices, never silent charges. A no-show or inside-cutoff cancellation creates a real open fee invoice owed by the customer and visible on the customer's profile. It is never a silent card charge. Staff shall tell the customer the invoice exists and collect against it.
• Held deposits apply first. A deposit already held is applied against the fee before anything else; the deposit is marked applied and the invoice records it in its notes. A held deposit larger than the fee stays held: deposits are not split: and the invoice says so; the desk applies the remainder manually.
• One fee per appointment. Re-applying a no-show transition finds the existing fee invoice by its record tag and charges nothing twice. Marking no-show twice does not double-bill, but un-marking and re-marking to "fix" something can confuse the history, so staff shall get the status right the first time.

A service created on first touch starts with a deposit requirement and a $25 default deposit. That is the starting value, not the policy; the location's booking rules decide what is actually charged.

Booking at the desk, start to finish

For a phone or walk-in booking, staff shall follow this procedure in order. Every step exists because skipping it creates a specific later problem

1. Search first. Email, then phone, then last name. If the customer exists, open the profile; do not create a new record.
2. Confirm the pets. Which dog or dogs, and is the registry pet the right one? Check the handling profile for cautions before promising a groomer or a slot; a special-handling dog booked to a groomer without that specialty is a problem created at the desk.
3. Pick the service and add-ons. Service lines are priced from the service's default price, recorded at booking. Quote the total from the appointment, not from memory; the recorded price is the price the customer pays.
4. Pick the slot. Check the groomer's day, not only the customer's preference. Stored appointment times are in the salon's timezone, America/Chicago; the wall-clock time the customer hears is Chicago time.
5. Take the deposit if the location's rules require one. Deposit paid is its own status; use it. A booking with money down no-shows less.
6. Read back the appointment number. It is searchable in global search and is the key the customer uses if they call back.
7. Confirm the contact details. Email is the matching key and reminder destination; phone is for text reminders. Fix errors now; a typo diverts every future reminder.
8. Set the confirmation flags' starting state honestly. Service type and payment method start unconfirmed unless verified on the spot. An honest unconfirmed flag is better than a false confirmed one; the morning triage works from these flags.

If the customer is new: create the customer record (email is mandatory), link or create the pet, and set the lead source.

Controls

• Staff shall not re-create an appointment after a linking failure, and shall not mark no-show or cancel an appointment without being certain, because both actions move money.
• No fee shall be promised or charged unless the location's booking rule for it is actually stored.
• Appointment history shall not be edited. Corrections are made by new entries.

Records

Each appointment creates an appointment record with its number, status, times, and money figures; pet and service link records with snapshotted prices; a status history entry and an audit entry for every transition; and, where a fee applies, a fee invoice with any held deposit applied. Waitlist entries are kept with their requested windows and outcomes. These records are kept in the customer record system.

Escalation and review

Managers review unlinked appointments, disputed fees, and booking rules before they are relied on. A booking fault that the store cannot resolve shall be reported to support@aapawz.com. Legal process concerning an appointment or fee record shall be directed to legal@aapawz.com.