Booking deposit: what actually holds the slot
A booking deposit is the money that takes a time slot off the table for everyone else. Don't set it by what the service costs — set it by how long it takes you to refill that hour.
Ulises rents out two 7-a-side soccer fields in Reynosa. His priciest slot is Saturday at eight at night: $700, and it gets booked as early as Tuesday. Last Saturday, at six, he got a message: “hey, we can’t make it, people bailed on us.”
He wasn’t mad about the $700. He was mad because at six in the evening there’s no time left to find anyone else. A lost order you can sell again tomorrow. A lost hour, you can’t.
A booking deposit is the money a customer pays so their time slot stops being available to everyone else. It’s not an extra charge or a penalty — it comes off what they pay at the end. What changes isn’t the price, it’s who carries the risk of the empty hour.
How is it different from a down payment?
A down payment covers something you’ve already bought. The upholsterer asks for half up front because that’s what pays for the fabric, and if the customer backs out, the fabric’s already been cut.
There’s no fabric here. Ulises doesn’t spend a peso to hold a Saturday. What he loses when someone cancels is the hour itself: it existed, nobody used it, and there’s no way to sell it after the fact.
That’s why the math is different. A down payment is calculated on a cost. A deposit is calculated on how long you need to refill the slot.
Why isn’t a customer’s “yes” enough?
Because a “yes” over WhatsApp doesn’t hold anything. Ulises learned this three times in the same month: he’d jot the name in his notebook, turn down two other people, and by Friday the first one would vanish.
On a page built with Proyecta, the schedule works the other way around, and this is the part that matters: the slot is held the moment the money comes in, not when someone fills out a form. While the payment isn’t confirmed, the slot keeps showing as open to everyone else. Someone who abandons checkout halfway through blocks nothing for you, and if two people go for the same slot, only one gets it — the other gets their payment refunded automatically.
It’s a small change in the order of things, and it removes the whole problem: you stop having slots held by promises.
How big should the booking deposit be?
Don’t look for a percentage. Look for the number that makes telling you cheaper than just disappearing.
Think about it from the customer’s side. Canceling on you costs some embarrassment: they have to write the message, give the excuse, look bad. If losing the deposit hurts less than that embarrassment, they won’t tell you — they’ll just leave you hanging. The deposit works when it flips that order.
Ulises charges $200 out of the $700. That’s enough for people to message him on Thursday instead of standing him up on Saturday, and low enough that nobody skips booking over it. When he bumped it to $350 during high season, cancellations didn’t drop — bookings did.
You know you’ve got it right when nobody argues about the amount and cancellations come in with days to spare.
How late can they cancel without losing it?
This is the part almost everyone skips, and it’s the one that actually protects you. A deposit with no deadline isn’t a policy — it’s a hope.
The rule is simple: your window has to be at least as long as it takes you to refill the slot. Ulises takes about a day — he posts it in the neighborhood group and someone grabs it. So his window is 24 hours: cancel before that, and the deposit rolls over to another day; after that, it’s gone.
That window pairs well with the reminder the page sends the customer, and only the customer, 24 hours before their slot, just once. Ulises set it up that way on purpose: the reminder lands right at the last moment they can still cancel without losing anything. Whoever isn’t coming says so right there. And at that point it still does you some good.
What if they just don’t show up?
It gets written down. In Proyecta’s calendar, a booking that’s already passed closes in one of two states — showed up, or no-show — and the person who didn’t show can’t erase that record from their account. They can cancel beforehand; once the slot has passed, the history is untouchable.
Sounds like a technicality. It’s the opposite. It’s the only way to know, three months from now, whether the problem is “customers” or four repeat offenders. Ulises had nine no-show hours in a month; five of them were the same team. He started charging that one the full hour upfront. Nothing changed for everyone else.
How do you set it up on your page?
You describe it. Something like: “a page to rent out my two soccer fields by the hour, that charges a $200 deposit to hold the slot and notifies me when someone books.”
From that comes a real, published schedule with its own link. The booking deposit is set on the service as either a percentage or a flat amount — one or the other, not both — and the rest is left as the balance due: if the hour is $700 and the deposit is $200, the system knows $500 is still owed, without you having to track it.
And the moment the deposit comes in, the booking is confirmed right then. There’s no second step where you have to approve anything.
What won’t the page do for you?
Two things, and it’s better to know them going in.
You set the deadline, in your own words. The system won’t decide on its own whether a deposit gets refunded, moved to another date, or forfeited. Write your rule in one line, right next to the price, before you start charging: “cancel more than 24 hours ahead and your deposit rolls over to any date you want; after that, it’s forfeited.” It’s the most awkward conversation in the business, and you settle it once, in writing.
And whatever happens off the page is still on you. If someone books by phone and pays cash, no deposit applies there — that’s a word-of-mouth deal, which is exactly what you were trying to leave behind.
Count the hours, not the customers
Open last week’s calendar and mark every hour that sat empty because someone canceled late or didn’t show. Don’t count people or how much they owe you. Add up the hours.
That number is what not charging a deposit is costing you — and it’s the same number that shows up nowhere else, because an empty hour doesn’t generate a single complaint.
When you’re ready to try it, describe it on Proyecta and publish it. Your Saturday slot stops depending on someone remembering.