Can you take a deposit or charge a no-show fee?

No deposit is taken at booking. Lumoras asks the customer to put a card on file before an online booking is confirmed, and you charge an agreed no-show fee by hand after a missed appointment. No money moves when the card is saved, and nothing is ever charged automatically.

What this does

Saving a card is an agreement with the customer, not a payment: if I do not turn up, this shop may charge me up to $X. Because the agreement is with the person rather than one booking, their next appointment is covered by the same card without being asked again.

Card numbers are held by the payment processor. Lumoras stores two opaque references and never the card.

Choose who gets asked

In Settings, open the bookings section and pick who an online booking asks for a card:

Nobody — the default. Online booking behaves as it always has.
Only flagged clients — the customers you have marked as requiring a deposit.
Everybody — every online booking.

Two things worth knowing before you choose. Asking only flagged clients tells those customers, by asking, that they are in that group; asking everybody says nothing about anyone. And a client you have banned is refused under every setting — no fee buys past that.

You cannot ask for a card and name a zero fee. A policy like that inconveniences every customer and protects you from nothing, so the system will not save it.

Set the fee

The fee is one amount per business, and it is frozen at the moment each customer agrees to it. If you later raise your fee from $20 to $50, a customer who typed their card in under the $20 policy can still only be charged $20. The fee someone saw is the only fee they consented to.

Charge for a missed appointment

Mark the appointment no-show.
Open it and charge the fee.
Confirm the amount, which is the one that customer agreed to.

What that leaves behind:

The charge is recorded with who decided to make it, by name. Charging an absent customer's card is a judgement someone made, and the record says who.
One successful charge per appointment, ever. Tapping twice cannot take the fee twice.
Declined attempts are recorded too, with the processor's reason, and you can try again later. A card that failed today may work next week.
A no-show fee is not a sale. It sits on its own line and never enters your sales reports — nothing was delivered and there is no order behind it.

Cards taken at the counter

A card saved online lives in the online processor's vault; a card kept from a sale at the terminal lives in the terminal processor's vault. A no-show fee can be charged against either, and the client record says which one applies — so there is never any doubt about which card a charge will use.

What happens on a phone booking

When your policy requires a card, the AI receptionist is told so before it offers times, along with the most it could cost the caller, and it says that out loud: this booking needs a card on file first, and the shop may charge up to $30 if the appointment is missed. The card itself is saved on your booking page or at the counter.

Check that it worked

A test booking on your own booking page asks for a card when your setting says it should.
The saved card shows against the client, not against that one appointment.
A test charge appears on its own line, with your name on it, and does not appear in your sales total.

Troubleshooting

The booking page never asks for a card. The audience is set to nobody, or the business has no card processing connected yet.
The fee cannot be saved. An amount of zero is refused while the audience is anything other than nobody.
The charge was declined. The reason from the processor is kept on the attempt. Whether to mention it to the customer is your call, not the system's.
A client cannot book at all. Banned clients are refused whatever the deposit policy says.