Cancelling or dropping a booking

• Cancel vs drop, in one paragraph

  A collector taps Cancel; the booking records Cancelled by: Client. A practitioner taps Drop; the booking records Dropped by: Practitioner. If the system itself ends the booking — for example, because a proposed date passed without anyone confirming, or the practitioner ghosted on receiving the deposit for 21 days — the booking records Cancelled by: System. All three end up in Bookings → Requests → Review → Dropped. The attribution line on the dropped card tells you which one happened, and reading it is the fastest way to understand what went on if you come back to a booking weeks later.

• Where the deposit math comes from

  Whenever a deposit was paid (or even just sent), tapping Cancel or Drop hands the booking off to the deposit-rules logic. That's the part that decides eligible for a refund vs deposit forfeited — based on the policy snapshot frozen on your booking the moment it was created and the days of notice between today and the appointment date. The practitioner is the one who sets that policy up, in the Policies & Legal info card on their profile (Info tab) — first practitioner step below walks through the fields. The rules, the safety nets (practitioner moved your appointment, practitioner ghosted on the deposit), and the actual refund send-and-confirm loop are all in Deposit rules and refund eligibility. This article only covers the moment you tap the button and what the screens look like; everything that happens to the money afterwards is handled there.

Step by step

1. 1

   Open the booking and tap Cancel

   Find the booking under Bookings → Requests → Pending or Confirmed (depending on whether the practitioner has fully confirmed it yet). Tap the card to open the booking detail page.

   The Cancel button sits inside the booking detail itself. On a time-based booking (a piercing / laser / PMU appointment) the button cancels the whole booking in one tap. On a project-based booking (tattoo, body modification) you cancel one session at a time — open the session you want to cancel and use the per-session Cancel action there. There's no single button that walks away from a multi-session project all at once; if you've decided the whole project is off, you cancel each session in turn.

2. 2

   Read the eligibility preview before you confirm

   Tapping Cancel doesn't cancel anything yet — it opens a modal that pre-computes the deposit math for you so you know what's going to happen before you commit.

   • If you're eligible for a refund, the modal shows a green box with the policy that applied ("Policy requires 7 days notice. You're cancelling with 10 days notice.") and the deposit amount that's coming back to you.
   • If you're not eligible, the modal shows a red box with the same kind of policy line ("Policy requires 7 days notice. You're only giving 2 days notice.") plus a mandatory acknowledgement checkbox — "I understand I will lose my €N deposit" — that has to be ticked before the Confirm button activates. There's no way to forfeit a deposit by mistake.
   • If there was no deposit on the booking at all, the modal skips the deposit box entirely and just asks for an optional reason.

   There's a free-text reason field at the bottom (500-character soft cap, optional). It's for the practitioner's eyes — they'll see whatever you write on the dropped booking. Keep it short and human; it's the closest thing to a goodbye note in this flow.

3. 3

   Confirm — and know there's no Withdraw button

   Once you tap Confirm Cancellation, the cancel is committed. There is no Withdraw Cancellation button anywhere in the app — it was deliberately left out so the cancel button never gets misused as a "let me think about it" toggle. If you change your mind right after tapping Confirm, the only path is to message the practitioner and ask them to start a fresh booking with you; the cancelled one stays cancelled.

   This is also the right step to remember the difference between cancelling a session and cancelling the whole project on a multi-session booking. If you cancel session 3 of a 5-session tattoo, sessions 1, 2, 4, and 5 are untouched — they stay on track with their own dates, prices, and deposits.

4. 4

   What you see after the booking is cancelled

   Where the booking goes next depends on whether a deposit was actually in motion:

   • No deposit was paid — the booking moves to Review → Dropped straight away. Done.
   • You'd marked the deposit as sent but the practitioner hadn't confirmed it yet — the booking parks in awaiting deposit confirmation. The practitioner is asked to confirm receipt before the refund flow can kick in (or to declare they never received it, which opens a different sub-flow). You'll see this status on the booking detail page and you don't have to do anything until they respond.
   • The deposit was already confirmed by the practitioner and you're refund-eligible — the booking enters the refund send-and-confirm loop: the practitioner sends the money back outside the app, marks it as sent, and you confirm you received it. Walk-through and what to do if they go silent: Deposit rules and refund eligibility — same article, The refund flow, step by step and the day-7 / day-14 / day-21 FAQ.
   • The deposit was confirmed but you're not eligible — the booking moves to Review → Dropped immediately and the deposit stays with the practitioner.

   In every case the dropped card in the Review tab shows three lines at the bottom: the Reason you typed (or "No reason provided"), a Policy line if a deposit was forfeited explaining why, and a Cancelled by: Client attribution row.

Frequently asked questions

I tapped Cancel and immediately changed my mind. Is there an undo?

No. The Cancel button has no Withdraw on the other side — that was a deliberate product choice (the cancel button shouldn't double as a "thinking about it" toggle, and a partial cancel state is more confusing than a clean re-book). If you regret it, message the practitioner directly and ask them to take a fresh booking from you. The cancelled one stays in your Review tab as a record of what happened.

What's the practical difference between *Cancelled* and *Dropped* in my Review tab?

Attribution. The booking is in the same end state either way (it's not happening, money is settled), but Cancelled by: Client means you (the client) walked away, and Dropped by: Practitioner means the practitioner did. Cancelled by: System means InkMap auto-rejected it — usually because a proposed date passed without anyone confirming, or because of a 21-day timeout. The label is the difference; the booking itself is over in all three cases.

Why is there no "cancel the whole project" button on a multi-session tattoo?

Project-based bookings always cancel one session at a time, by design. Each session has its own date, its own deposit, its own eligibility math, and its own consequences if it's the one being walked away from. A single "cancel the whole project" button would either bypass that per-session logic or have to apply it five times in a row anyway — splitting it across the session cards keeps the per-session decisions visible. The same applies on the practitioner's Drop side.

I cancelled a session before the practitioner had confirmed receiving my deposit. What happens?

The booking parks in awaiting deposit confirmation. The practitioner is asked to either confirm they got the deposit (then the refund flow continues if you're eligible) or say they didn't receive it (then you can re-mark it as sent — same money, no second payment). Full walk-through in Deposit rules and refund eligibility, under The refund flow, step by step. If the practitioner stays silent on the confirm tap, the day-7 / day-14 / day-21 chain kicks in and a public notice lands on their profile at day 21.

I'm a practitioner — does editing my cancellation policy change my existing bookings?

No. The policy is frozen onto every booking at the moment that booking is created. If you tighten or loosen the Notice Period for Deposit Refund (or any other field on the Policies & Legal card) afterwards, only new bookings inherit the new version. Bookings already on your books keep running on the snapshot they were created with — visible on the booking detail page itself so neither side has to remember which rule applied.

I'm a client — where do I see the practitioner's cancellation policy *before* I book?

Two places. On the practitioner's public profile, the Policies & Legal info card under the Info tab spells out the full version. On the booking flow itself — the deposit-payment screen and the booking detail — a condensed version (the days-of-notice number, the never-refundable flag if it's on, and the practitioner's optional notes) sits next to the deposit amount, so you don't have to leave the booking to read it.

I'm a practitioner dropping a session before the date — do I really have no say on the refund?

Right. When you initiate the drop on a still-future appointment, the platform doesn't run the policy snapshot's notice-period math at all. That math is for cancellations the client makes; the policy is the practitioner's commitment to the client, not the other way round. If you drop, the deposit goes back, full amount.

The booking suddenly says *Cancelled by: System*. What did I miss?

Nothing — the system did it. The two common triggers are: a proposed date passed without anyone confirming it (project-based date auto-rejection), or a manual deposit was marked sent and the practitioner stayed silent for 21 days (the deposit-ghosting backstop). The booking detail page shows a banner explaining which of the two happened. The day-21 ghosting case also lands a public notice on the practitioner's profile — see InkMap Warnings, explained.

I dropped a session and a deposit was held. The booking still shows up in my active list — why?

Because the refund hasn't fully closed yet. The drop itself is recorded, but the booking only finalises (moves to Review) once the money side has settled — Stripe refund processed, or manual refund marked sent + client confirmed received. While the refund is mid-flight, the booking stays in the Pending / Confirmed area with a refund-pending banner. That's working as intended: it's a reminder that you owe something, not a glitch.