Booking Operations

This standard governs the booking settings of All About Pawz, LLC: every rule about when customers can book, how far ahead, what cancellation costs, and whether money is taken in advance. The rules are held as booking settings, read directly by the booking engine, and managed through the Booking Rules and Operating Hours & Holidays screens in the settings hub. There is no separate booking configuration elsewhere. The Booking Operations Administrator: the operations manager for grooming and services: owns these settings; front-desk staff propose changes and do not make them. A booking setting never overrides a governing legal document: cancellation and deposit terms shown to a customer are applied as the governing policy states them, including the Returns and Refunds Policy, and a fee is charged only where the customer agreed to it at booking under those terms.

When a rule does not appear to apply

The investigation order is fixed

1. Is the setting saved?
2. Is it saved in the right place?
3. Is the stored copy the engine reads still current? Settings reads are held briefly before refreshing, so a change is given a few minutes before it is judged broken.
4. Is something more specific overriding it: hours, a blackout, or a service-level value?

Hours live with the organization record and are governed by Organization; this standard governs the booking rules that work alongside them.

The booking settings and their defaults

The following are the Platform defaults. A tenant's values may differ where they have been changed; where a setting has never been touched, the default is what the engine uses.

1. Booking horizon: 90 days. How far ahead anyone can book. Without a cap, a customer books next year's holiday appointment under this year's prices and hours. Ninety days covers the holiday booking window for grooming; it is shortened only where the planning horizon genuinely cannot hold that far.
2. Cancellation cutoff: 24 hours. The line between free cancellation and late cancellation. It is matched to reality: where a cancelled slot refills from the waitlist within hours, a shorter cutoff can be justified; where a late cancellation means an empty station, 24 hours stands. Whatever is set is enforced for everyone or for no one: staff waiving it "just this once" for regulars creates two policies, the written one and the real one, and customers talk to each other.
3. Cancellation fee: none by default. No-show fee: none by default. A no-show charge works only where the customer agreed to it at booking and a payment method is on file, which is why these settings are companions to the deposit settings below. Where a fee is set, it is set high enough to change behaviour and not so high it manufactures disputes, and it is applied the same day: a charge landing three days later feels arbitrary, while a same-day charge reads as the policy working.
4. No-show grace period: 15 minutes after the appointment time before the appointment is counted a no-show. This is not set to zero.
5. Deposits: off by default; where on, 25 percent, with a flat-amount alternative. The deposit requirement is the single most effective no-show measure: a customer with money down attends. A percentage scales with the service: a full groom carries a larger deposit than a nail trim, matching the larger hole a no-show leaves; a flat amount is simpler to state aloud. Deposit handling in the books is governed by Deposits. Where deposits are enabled, the full course is tested before real customers touch it: book, pay the deposit, cancel inside the window, and verify the refund lands cleanly. Discovering a broken refund path through an angry customer is the expensive way to learn.
6. Turnaround buffer: 15 minutes of invisible time between appointments at a station: cleaning, tool sanitizing, table reset. The engine adds it to the service duration when looking for the next free slot, so a 60-minute groom occupies 75 minutes of station time. It is set honestly: too short creates no capacity, only a cascade in which every appointment starts late and by afternoon the salon is half an hour behind with a full lobby. It is reviewed seasonally; shedding-season cleaning takes longer than January cleaning.
7. Default duration: 120 minutes, the fallback where a service has no duration of its own.
8. Overbooking threshold: 10 percent past nominal capacity before the engine treats booking as overbooking.
9. Automatic confirmation: off by default. Where it is off, bookings need a human confirmation: the right posture for a chronically full schedule. Where it is on, the engine confirms directly. The posture is chosen to match the current goal and revisited quarterly; the right answer changes as the business does.
10. Required vaccines: Rabies, DHPP, Bordetella. The intake requirement, shown where customers book and checked at arrival.

Hours, blackouts, and the online switch

Hours are kept one row per location per day and are enforced as binding by the booking engine: no slots exist outside them, ever. The hours view brings together the hours, the blackout list, and the online-booking switch in one place.

1. Blackouts record closures and are applied to availability as they are entered. The big ones are added the moment they are decided: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year. Online booking reads them as entered, so an October booking for late December correctly shows the closure. The note on each blackout is written for the operator's future self: months later, facing a revenue gap, "Thanksgiving" is the difference between an answer and a mystery. Old blackouts are not deleted; they are the record of when the business was actually closed.
2. The online-booking switch is the master control the public booking path checks. Where online booking is unexpectedly unavailable, that switch is checked first, before hours or rules are touched.
3. Hours-change discipline follows Organization: the Platform does not move existing appointments when hours change, so after any change the operator takes the upcoming appointments for the affected days and handles the exceptions personally; and a closed day is marked closed, never deleted, because a missing row is ambiguous and an explicit closed marker is not.

How the pieces interact

The engine needs hours and rules to agree, and the administrator changes one thing at a time so that, where the figures look wrong afterward, there is exactly one suspect

1. Shortening hours without checking strands existing appointments outside the new window; the system will not move them.
2. Enabling deposits without a working refund path manufactures disputes.
3. A 24-hour cancellation cutoff without a waitlist feels punitive; with one, a cancelled slot resells itself.

Controls

• Who may change booking settings. The Booking Operations Administrator, and an owner. Front-desk staff, groomers, and franchise staff for another tenant may not change the Company's booking rules; franchise tenants set their own booking rules within their own tenant, under Franchise Signup.
• What a change causes. A booking-rule change applies to new bookings as the engine next reads the settings; it does not move, reprice, or cancel existing appointments. A change to fees or deposit requirements applies only where the customer agrees to the new terms at booking; appointments already booked are handled under the terms in force when they were made.
• A booking setting never overrides a governing legal document. Where a setting and the Returns and Refunds Policy, a cancellation term shown to the customer, or any policy in §2 differ, the legal document governs and the setting is corrected.
• Deposit money is handled only under Deposits: a deposit is a liability until applied or forfeited under its terms, and it is never treated as revenue at booking.

Records created and where they are kept

Booking setting values and their change history, hours and blackout records, and the test-booking results this standard requires are kept in the Platform's settings and administrative records and retained under the Regulatory Record Retention Policy.

Escalation

A booking rule that will not apply after the investigation order above, or a deposit refund path that fails its test, goes to support@aapawz.com. A dispute with a customer over a cancellation fee, a no-show charge, or a deposit goes to the Booking Operations Administrator, and legal process to legal@aapawz.com.

Review cadence

Booking settings are reviewed quarterly: horizon, cutoff, fees, buffer, and confirmation posture: and the buffer is reviewed seasonally. This standard is reviewed whenever the booking engine's use of a setting changes.