Your past clients are your best source of next month's revenue.

A cancelled aesthetic appointment is not a fifteen-minute gap. Injectables, laser, and body-contouring appointments routinely block 45 to 90 minutes of a licensed injector's or provider's time, and that provider is often paid whether or not the client arrives. Product may already be drawn, and the room may already be turned over.

The transaction value compounds it. Aesthetic visits sit well above a typical medical copay, and clients often book a series rather than a single visit, so a client lost at visit two of six takes four more appointments with them. Sizing this on the single missed treatment understates it by a wide margin.

The scheduling pattern makes it worse again. Aesthetic appointments are booked weeks out, and the longer the lead time, the higher the chance the client's plans change. A policy that only takes effect 24 hours ahead is arriving very late in that cycle.

Med spas are one of the few clinical settings where a card on file or a deposit at booking is genuinely standard, and clients expect it. The point of the deposit is not the revenue, it is the commitment: a client who has put money down turns up, or reschedules early enough that you can refill the slot.

The wider medical world is moving the same direction, if more slowly. An MGMA Stat poll of 622 practice leaders in January 2025 found 42% of medical groups now charge a no-show fee, and that the groups charging one reported better attendance improvement over the prior year than the groups that did not.

Two details separate a policy that works from one that annoys clients. State it at booking, in the confirmation, and in the reminder, so nobody meets it for the first time on an invoice. And give yourself an explicit discretion clause, so the front desk can waive it for a genuine emergency without appearing to break the rule.

Med spas rarely run a clinical EHR as the primary schedule. Mindbody, Boulevard, Zenoti, Aesthetic Record, Mangomint, and Vagaro cover most of the market, and the booking system, not the chart, is where the cancellation happens.

Mindbody is a native Recupra integration, so we read its bookable-items inventory directly and book the replacement client in. Its Public API has no cancel route, so Recupra never cancels a Mindbody appointment and says so on the Mindbody integration page. The others connect through our assisted setup.

A cancellation fee recovers some of the lost value. Refilling the slot recovers all of it, and keeps the client relationship intact. In aesthetics the waitlist is unusually easy to work, because clients are motivated, treatments are elective, and a same-week opening with a preferred injector is a genuinely attractive offer.

That is the case waitlist automation is built for, and it is why the fee and the refill belong in the same policy rather than in separate conversations.