She didn't show up. You still paid for the slot.

You held the slot. You turned away someone else who wanted it, or you kept the chair empty so it would be ready. Then the client does not turn up, does not call, and replies three days later with "sorry, something came up".

You cannot charge for that. Not because it would be unfair to charge — it would not — but because asking for money after the fact is debt collection, and you have no leverage.

What a no-show actually costs

The empty hour is the smallest part of it. The real bill is:

• The booking you refused. If you turned someone away to hold that slot, you paid for the no-show out of your own calendar.
• The preparation. Hair bought, tools set out, a room cleaned.
• The staff hour. If someone was rostered to it, you paid them for a client who never arrived.
• The evening. The follow-up messages, the renegotiating, the rescheduling — all unpaid.

Why reminders alone do not solve it

Reminders help. They are a nudge, and a nudge works on someone who was already coming, or who is simply forgetful. They do nothing about the client who changed their mind, or spent the money somewhere else.

The mechanism that does work is not persuasion. It is leverage. A client who has already paid turns up, because the alternative is losing money they have already spent.

Paid up front, in practice

On Bookwik a booking is paid for when it is made — not when the client arrives. Your client picks a service, picks a time, and pays on the page. The slot is then theirs.

Two things follow from that. The one everybody notices is that on the odd occasion a client still does not show, you were paid anyway. The one that matters more day to day is that the slot cannot be double-booked while you are confirming it: if the time is already taken, the booking is refused.

The arithmetic

On a ₦30,000 booking — a full set of knotless braids, four hours of your day — the card fee is 1.5%, which is ₦450. You keep ₦29,550. Bookwik's commission is ₦0.

That fee is capped at ₦2,000 per order, so it never grows with the size of the booking. Per order, not per month.

Payouts settle the same day and the transfer is a flat ₦50. Balances under ₦1,050 wait for the next payout rather than being eaten by the transfer fee.

If you want to try it

Bookwik is free to join, with no monthly fee, and setting your page up takes about 15 minutes. We are onboarding businesses by hand while we are pre-launch, so request early access and we will do it with you.