Hey Harry! 

Right now Dentally does not support automatically charging a saved card for missed appointments or late cancellations. However, we do have a process for handling these situations. When a patient doesn't attend, our system automatically marks the appointment as 'Did Not Attend' at the end of the day. At this point, you can manually raise an invoice if needed.

For patients who have paid a deposit, it will remain in their account even if they cancel their appointment. You can manage this deposit through the patient's 'Account' tab, where you can either leave it unexplained (recommended) or explain it with notes.

If you need to charge an additional fee for the no-show, you would need to do this manually by raising a new invoice.

I understand how valuable an automatic charge feature would be to streamline your workflow. I’ll share it with our Product team and I’ll keep you in the loop. Our developers are also working hard on improving our API to ensure it’s secure, fast, and reliable for all our customers. Lots of effort is going into this and it seems it may be something you’re interested in! Hopefully, we’ll be able to share more about it soon! 

The matter is made worse when a patient who has a deposit for e.g. hygiene or whatever, automatically cancells their appointment via the portal and we lose track of who was booked in that space.  If the patient did not show up and we mark it as DNA, we also manually charge the whole amount or a penalty whilst we still can.  

When it’s not showing, we forget to do this and we also forget how to run a report of cancelled appointments for us to manually do it.

Hi ​@BCDC2023! Thanks for sharing your experience.  I’ll log this in our tracker so our Product team can look at adding an automatic cancellation report or alert for deposits. That way you won’t miss charging a penalty when someone cancels.

I’ll keep you posted here as we make progress. Feedback like yours drives the improvements we roll out, so thank you!