Cancellation Policies and Refunds for Recording Studios
Set a cancellation window and a late-cancellation fee, publish them on your booking page, and issue refunds in one click when you cancel a session.
Cancellations happen. An artist gets sick, travel falls through, a session moves. What you want is a policy your clients see up front, a cancellation window the software enforces for you, and a one-click way to return money when you decide to. That is what PunchIn gives you.
Your policy is enforced at the point of cancellation
You set a cancellation window — the number of hours of notice a client must give. When a client tries to cancel their own booking inside that window, PunchIn refuses it and tells them how much notice your studio requires. They have to contact you directly, which is exactly the conversation you want to be having about a late cancellation.
Outside the window, clients can cancel themselves without involving you.
Clients see the terms before they pay
Your cancellation window, your deposit percentage, and your late-cancellation fee are all shown on the booking page before a client confirms and pays. Nobody agrees to a session without seeing what happens if they pull out, so a late cancellation is never a surprise argument — it is a term they already accepted.
You configure all three under Config → Policies:
- Cancellation notice — hours of notice required to cancel.
- Deposit — the percentage of the session total taken up front, with the balance due at the session.
- Late cancellation fee — the percentage of the booking total your studio retains on a late cancellation, displayed to the client as part of your terms.
Refunding is one click, not a trip to Stripe
When you cancel a session from your dashboard, you choose whether to refund it at the same time. Refund it, and PunchIn issues the full Stripe refund against the original payment for you — including reversing the transfer to your connected account. Decline the refund, and the booking is cancelled with the reason recorded against it.
Either way the slot is released back to your calendar immediately, the Google Calendar events PunchIn created are removed, and the client is emailed.
Because you make the refund call yourself, you keep the judgement: a regular client with a genuine emergency can be refunded outside your stated policy, and a repeat late-canceller does not have to be.
One case PunchIn refunds for you
There is a single situation where a refund is issued automatically without you touching it: if a client pays for a slot that is no longer available — a rare race where the session was taken or released between payment starting and completing — PunchIn refunds them in full straight away rather than holding money for a session it cannot honour.
Keep the policy, lose the admin
Set your window once, let the booking page publish it, and handle the exceptions yourself in one click when they come up.