Booking statuses, explained

• The tabs you actually see

  On the Bookings page, the Requests tab opens five sub-tabs for clients (Draft, Broadcast, Pending, Confirmed, Review) and four for practitioners (Broadcast for tattoo artists only, Pending, Confirmed, Review). Draft and Broadcast aren't statuses — Draft is a half-filled form you saved, and Broadcast is a request type, not a stage. The three status tabs are the ones we're explaining here.

  • Pending — the booking is in motion. Either the practitioner hasn't read the brief yet, the client and practitioner are still negotiating fields, the deposit hasn't been confirmed, or some combination of those.
  • Confirmed — everything that has to be agreed is agreed, the slot (or every session) is locked, and the appointment is on the calendar. The booking sits here from confirmation up until the work happens.
  • Review — the appointment date has passed (or the booking ended early). This tab has two sub-tabs: Completed (the work happened) and Dropped (the work didn't happen). Reviews and accountability live here.

• How a booking moves through the tabs

  A new booking always lands in Pending. From there, the path to Confirmed depends on the booking model — the model itself, and which side is doing what at each step, are covered in Time-based vs project-based bookings explained.

  • Time-based bookings (piercer, permanent makeup, laser) become Confirmed automatically when the client submits — unless the service requires a deposit, in which case the booking sits in Pending until the practitioner confirms the deposit was received, then moves to Confirmed.
  • Project-based bookings (tattoo, body modification) become Confirmed once the practitioner has proposed each session's date, time, duration, price, and deposit, and the client has accepted every one — and any required deposit is confirmed.

  Once Confirmed, the booking stays there until the appointment date passes. After that, it moves to Review. Whether it lands in Completed or Dropped depends on what happened (see The two ways a booking ends below).

• Sessions inside project-based bookings

  A project-based booking can have multiple sessions in one record (a long tattoo across three sittings is one booking, three sessions). Each session has its own status, independent of the booking-level status:

  • Pending session — at least one of the session's fields (date, time, duration, price, deposit) is still being negotiated, or the deposit hasn't been confirmed yet.
  • Confirmed session — every field is accepted and the session is locked on the calendar.
  • Completed session — the work happened and the practitioner has marked it complete.
  • Dropped session — the session was dropped (no-show, last-minute cancel, practitioner cancelled, etc.) before completion.

  A useful rule about confirmed fields: once a field is accepted, only the practitioner can re-open it. If the practitioner needs to change something — push the date back, adjust the price, extend the duration — they can propose a new value, which flips that field (and the session, and the booking) back to Pending until the client accepts the change. The client can't re-open a field they've already accepted — if they need something to change, they have to message the practitioner and ask them to re-propose it.

  The booking-level status is the rollup: a project-based booking is Confirmed only when every session is confirmed; it's Completed only when every session is completed (or some are completed and the rest are dropped). Because of that, a multi-session booking with mixed session statuses appears in multiple tabs at the same time — for example, a three-session booking where session 1 is completed, session 2 is confirmed, and session 3 is still being negotiated would show up in Confirmed (for session 2), Pending (for session 3), and Review > Completed (for session 1) all at once. Each card only shows the parts of the booking that match the tab you're looking at.

• Marking the work complete

  The appointment day arrives, the work happens, and the practitioner is the one who marks it complete on InkMap. There's no client-side "mark complete" button; the practitioner does it from their Bookings page once the session ends and that's what moves the booking (or the session) into Review > Completed.

  The exact moment the Mark Complete button becomes available depends on the booking model:

  • Time-based — the button appears once the slot's end time has passed (the booked duration is up). Time-based slots are short and the duration is the agreed length, so waiting for the end of the slot is the right signal that the appointment finished.
  • Project-based — the button appears as soon as the session's start time passes. A session can occasionally finish earlier than estimated, so the gate is on start time rather than end time — the practitioner shouldn't have to wait the full estimate out when that happens.

  For project-based bookings, the practitioner also enters the actual final price when marking the session complete (since project-based prices are estimates that often shift slightly as the work progresses). For time-based, the price was already locked from the service, so completion is one tap with no extra step.

• The two ways a booking ends

  However a booking gets to the Review tab — completed normally, dropped at the last minute, cancelled before the day, rejected outright — it ends up in one of two sub-tabs.

  • Completed — the work happened and the completion was confirmed (one side for time-based, both sides for project-based).
  • Dropped — the work didn't happen. This is one bucket for several different scenarios: the practitioner rejected the request, the client cancelled before the appointment, the practitioner dropped the booking after a no-show, or the system auto-dropped a time-based booking because the deposit wasn't confirmed in time. Each of these has different deposit and refund consequences (covered in Deposit rules and refund eligibility), but the booking-level outcome is the same: it lives in Review > Dropped with a reason attached.

  There's no separate "Cancelled" or "Rejected" tab — those are reasons inside Dropped, not destinations of their own.

Frequently asked questions

My booking was confirmed, but it just moved back to the Pending tab. What happened?

Two things can do this on a project-based booking. Either the practitioner added a follow-up session (the new session needs its date, time, duration, price, and deposit negotiated, so the booking-level status drops to pending while that happens), or the practitioner re-opened a field on an existing session — pushed the date back, adjusted the price, etc. — which flips that session and the booking back to pending until the client accepts the new value. In both cases, the earlier confirmed work is unchanged; nothing about already-accepted fields has to be re-agreed. The booking returns to Confirmed once the new session or new value is accepted.

What's the difference between a cancelled booking and a dropped booking?

They end up in the same place — Review > Dropped — but the timing and the actor are different. Cancelled means one side (usually the client) called it off before the appointment happened. Dropped is the broader bucket and includes those cancellations plus anything else that ends the booking without the work happening: a no-show on the day, the practitioner deciding not to take it on, the system auto-dropping it because a deposit wasn't paid in time. There's no "Cancelled" sub-tab on Review — anything that didn't end in completed work is grouped under Dropped, with a reason recorded on the booking.

Can I mark a booking or session complete as the client?

No — completion is the practitioner's action on InkMap. There's no client-side Mark Complete button on either time-based or project-based bookings. The practitioner taps it from their Bookings page once the appointment ends, and that's what flips the booking into Review > Completed and unlocks the review for you. If your appointment clearly happened and the practitioner hasn't marked it complete yet, you can message them to nudge — they may just have forgotten.

I'm in a multi-session project booking. One session shows as Completed, but the booking itself is still Confirmed. Is that a bug?

No — that's exactly how it works. Each session has its own status, and the booking-level status is the rollup of all of them. The booking stays Confirmed until every session is completed. So a three-session booking with one session done, one session locked for next month, and one session still being scheduled is one booking that's simultaneously in three tabs (Pending for the unscheduled session, Confirmed for the upcoming one, and Review > Completed for the finished one). Each tab only shows the slice of the booking that matches that tab's context.