Letting patients change or cancel their own appointment

Your appointment emails carry a Manage your booking button. A patient can tap it and move their appointment to another time, or cancel it, without ringing you and without needing a password. You decide how much notice they must give, and whether cancelling online is allowed at all.

Where the settings live

Everything is under Settings → Clinic → Booking policy:

Reschedule notice and Cancellation notice, in days. Inside that window the buttons disappear and the patient is asked to call you instead. Both default to three days.
Let patients change their own appointment time and Let patients cancel their own appointment. Both are on to begin with.
Changes allowed per booking. After this many moves, that patient is asked to call you rather than moving it again. The default is two.

These settings also cover patients signed in to their account, so switching one off takes it away from patients who may already be using it.

Should you allow cancellations online?

It is tempting to make people ring up, on the reasoning that it is harder to cancel and so fewer will. In practice that rarely reduces the number of people who do not attend. It tends to convert cancellations into no-shows, and the two are very different: a cancellation three days out is a slot you can refill, and if you use the waitlist we will offer it to someone automatically. A no-show is a dead hour and a chase.

What happens when a patient changes something

They can only pick times you are genuinely free, exactly as with a new booking, so your shifts, buffers and minimum notice all still apply.
The old time is offered to your waitlist straight away, if you use it.
They get a confirmation showing the old time and the new one, and you get an email telling you what moved.
Their reminders follow the appointment to its new date.
The calendar drawer shows that the patient moved it, and what it was booked for before.

Things it will not do

Visits with more than one treatment cannot be moved online. Shuffling a chain of back-to-back treatments is a judgement call, so the patient is asked to call you. They can still cancel the whole visit.
Cancelling never moves money by itself. If the patient cancelled with enough notice to earn their booking reservation fee back, the page tells them you will return it, we email you, and it appears on your Finance page until you have. The refund itself is always yours to issue, from your own Stripe dashboard.
An unpaid booking cannot be changed. If someone is midway through paying, the page asks them to wait for the confirmation email or call you.

Making sure you hear about it

Set a booking notification email under Settings → Clinic. Without one, changes a patient makes will show up in your diary but nothing will land in your inbox to tell you.