Some bookings deserve money up front. The four-hour de-matt that blocks a whole afternoon. The new client you have never met. The long weekend that fills six months out and then quietly empties in the last week.
Deposits are now live in Petboost. When a customer books online, you can take all of the booking total, part of it, or none of it, and you decide that per service rather than for the whole business.
1. Three modes, one setting
There are exactly three ways a deposit can be set:
- Pre-pay in Full. Charge 100% of the booking total when the customer books.
- Partial deposit. Charge a percentage or a fixed amount at booking. The percentage runs from 5% to 95% in 5% increments, so a 25% deposit on a $120 groom takes $30 at booking. For 100%, use Pre-pay in Full.
- No deposit. Do not charge anything when customers book.
This is the real control, with Partial deposit selected so you can see the amount options underneath it:
2. A business default, overridden per service
Set the default once in Settings under Pricing & Payments, then let individual services disagree with it.
That matters because most businesses do not want one blanket rule. A bath and tidy can go deposit-free while a full day of daycare, a de-matt, or a boarding stay asks for something up front. Each service shows whether it matches the business default or differs from it, and you can see the default without leaving the service.
One deliberate asymmetry: No deposit is a service-level option only. At business level you either require a deposit or you do not, and the switch itself is the off position. Opting a single service out of the default is what No deposit is for.
3. Charged at booking, balance collected as normal
The deposit is charged when the customer books, against the card they have on file. From there nothing changes about how you run the appointment: the remaining balance is collected after the service, exactly as it is today, and the deposit already paid comes off what is owed.
Taking a deposit online needs Stripe connected and a card on file for that customer. If a customer has no card saved, the booking asks for one before it will go through.
4. Refunds are automatic
This is the part people expect to be painful, so we made it hands-off.
- You decline the booking. The customer never gets the appointment, so the deposit refunds in full, automatically, including the card processing fee that was passed through.
- The customer cancels with enough notice. Inside your cancellation notice period, the deposit refunds in full, automatically.
- The customer cancels late. Only your cancellation-fee percentage of the deposit base is kept. The rest goes back automatically, and the unpaid remainder of the booking is never charged.
Nobody on your team has to process a refund by hand. The one thing outside our control is the bank: refunds typically take 5 to 10 business days to appear on the customer's statement, and that wait is worth saying out loud when someone asks where their money is.
Be honest with yourself about what a partial deposit protects. It only ever puts that portion of the booking in your hands, and on a late cancellation you keep your cancellation-fee percentage of that portion, not all of it. If a late cancellation on a big booking needs to cost the customer more than that, the answer is Pre-pay in Full, not a slightly larger partial deposit.
5. Where deposits apply
Deposits apply to self-serve, non-recurring online bookings only.
Bookings your team creates in the diary do not take a deposit, and neither does a recurring series. So a customer booking a one-off groom on your booking page pays the deposit; the same groom entered by your receptionist over the phone, or set up as a standing weekly slot, does not.
That is worth knowing before you announce a deposit policy to your clients, because it decides which bookings the policy actually covers.
6. Deposit or pre-authorisation
Pre-authorisation has not gone anywhere, and it is not the same tool.
A pre-authorisation places a hold on the card 72 hours before the appointment without charging it. If plans change, the hold releases and the funds return within 30 minutes to 24 hours. It proves the card is good and it stings nobody when a booking moves.
A deposit is a real charge at the moment of booking. The money is in your account, which is the point, and the trade-off is the 5 to 10 business days a refund takes to land back with the customer. When a booking takes a deposit, the pre-authorisation hold does not also run on it.
Use pre-auth when you want protection with the fastest release. Use a deposit when you want the money in hand before the day arrives, and Pre-pay in Full when the whole booking needs to be covered.
Deposits are in Settings under Pricing & Payments, and on every service form.
Explore payments in Petboost, self-service booking, or read the Winter 2026 round-up for everything else we have shipped recently.