A Tuesday with four empty slots in it, all of them booked that morning, all of them not attended. The clinician was in the building. The room was warm. Nothing was earned.
Deposits are the usual answer, and they do work. They also turn some patients away, and the practices that get this wrong tend to get it wrong in the same direction: they apply a deposit to everything, lose the bookings that were never at risk, and keep the ones that were.
What a deposit actually changes
It does not make somebody attend. It makes forgetting cost something, which is a different and smaller claim.
The patients who miss appointments divide roughly into three groups. People who forgot, people whose circumstances changed, and people who booked without really intending to come. A deposit moves the third group almost completely and barely touches the first two.
That matters because it tells you where a deposit helps. If your no-shows are mostly long-standing patients who got busy, a deposit will annoy them and change nothing. If your no-shows are mostly first-time bookings from people who found you online that week, a deposit will fix a large part of it.
Look at your last twenty missed appointments before deciding. The answer is usually visible.
Where a deposit is right
- First appointments from new patients. The highest-risk booking you take, and the one where a deposit is least likely to offend. Nobody is insulted by being asked to confirm they mean it.
- Long or expensive slots. An hour of a senior clinician's time costs you more to lose than fifteen minutes does.
- Peak times. Saturday mornings and after-work evenings have a queue behind them. A no-show in that slot turns away a patient who would have come.
Where it is wrong
- Established patients on a routine recall. They have attended eleven times. Asking for money up front reads as a change in the relationship, and the recall is the appointment you least want to discourage.
- Anything urgent. Somebody in pain should not meet a payment form. Take the booking.
- When the deposit exceeds the inconvenience. If the whole appointment is twenty-five, asking for twenty up front is not a deposit, it is payment in advance, and it will be read that way.
How much, and fixed or a percentage
A deposit works at a level where losing it is annoying rather than painful. Too small and it is not a commitment. Too large and it becomes a barrier at the moment you are trying to remove them.
A fixed amount is easier for patients to understand and easier for you to explain on the phone. A percentage scales with the appointment, which is fairer when your treatments vary a lot in price. Practices with a narrow price range tend to be happier with a fixed figure; practices running everything from a fifteen-minute review to a two-hour procedure usually want the percentage.
In Webkio the deposit is set once in your booking settings, as either a fixed amount or a percentage, and it applies to the services you choose. The payment goes directly into your own payment account.
Say what happens to it
This is the part that decides whether a deposit costs you bookings, and it is usually an afterthought.
Three sentences, visible before the patient pays, not buried in terms:
- What it comes off. A deposit that is deducted from the treatment price is a commitment. One that is not is a fee, and should be called one.
- When it is refundable. Most practices refund in full with reasonable notice, and say what reasonable means in hours.
- What happens if the patient cannot attend. The answer should involve rescheduling, not forfeiting, for anybody who gets in touch.
A clear policy converts better than a generous one that nobody can find. Writing a clinic cancellation and no-show policy covers the wording in detail.
Deposits do not replace reminders
The most common mistake is treating a deposit as the whole solution and dropping everything else.
A reminder the day before costs nothing, offends nobody and recovers the largest group of missed appointments, which is people who simply forgot. A deposit handles a smaller group that a reminder cannot reach. They are complementary, and a practice that takes deposits but sends no reminders has solved the less common problem.
Reducing patient no-shows sets out the full order to work through, and deposits are deliberately not first on that list.
Start narrow
Apply a deposit to new patient bookings only, leave everything else alone, and look at the numbers after a month. You will see whether the no-show rate moved and whether the booking rate moved with it.
If both improved, widen it. If bookings dropped more than no-shows did, you have learned something useful about your patients for the price of one month.
FAQ
Who holds the deposit money?
You do. Payments go directly into the practice's own payment account rather than being held by the website, which means a refund is yours to issue and the money is not sitting somewhere else while you wait for it.
What happens if the clinic has to cancel?
Refund it in full, immediately, without the patient having to ask. A deposit scheme survives on the patient believing it is fair, and nothing damages that faster than a clinic applying its own rules more gently to itself.
Can a deposit apply to some appointments and not others?
Yes, and it usually should. Deposits are set against the services you choose, so a first assessment can carry one while a routine review does not. Applying one rule to everything is the most common way a deposit costs more bookings than it saves.
Does taking a deposit change what the cancellation policy needs to say?
It makes it matter more. The moment money is involved, the patient will read the policy, so it has to say plainly how much notice earns a refund and what happens to somebody who reschedules rather than cancels.