Taking payment

Calemander can charge the people who book you. Connect your own Stripe or Square account, set a price on an event type, and the money goes straight to that account. This page is about what your attendees pay you. What you pay Calemander is on Billing and plans.

Connecting Stripe or Square

Go to Payments in the dashboard. There is a card for each provider, and you connect one of them. Stripe uses Stripe Connect; Square uses Square's OAuth. In both cases you authorise your own existing account, and payouts, refunds, statements and disputes stay in that account's own dashboard.

One provider is active at a time. While Stripe is connected the Square button is disabled and says Disconnect Stripe first, and the other way round. The page also warns you when booking checkouts are still awaiting payment, because disconnecting cuts them off; refunds for bookings already paid are unaffected.

After connecting Stripe, the card shows whether Stripe has actually enabled payments and payouts. A brand new account often comes back as setup incomplete with a list of what Stripe still needs. Until that is finished the account cannot take payments or hold a card, and Calemander says so rather than letting an attendee find out at the payment step.

One Square-specific limit is worth knowing before you choose: recurring tuition billing needs Stripe. One-time booking payments, deposits, cards on file and prepaid packages all work on either.

What Calemander takes

Nothing. Calemander adds no platform fee to what your attendees pay you. The Square connection does not even ask for the permission that would let it take one. Your provider's own processing fees still apply, and those are between you and them.

Setting a price on an event type

Each event type picks one of four payment modes in its editor:

• No payment — free to book.
• Pay in full — the whole price is charged at booking.
• Deposit — part of the price at booking; the rest is settled in person.
• Hold a card — nothing is charged at booking, and a fee applies only on a no-show or a late cancellation.

You cannot publish a price without a connected provider. Calemander refuses the save while you are typing the price rather than letting the attendee meet the refusal at checkout. An event type that offers several durations can price each duration separately; durations without their own price use the base price.

You hear about a paid booking once its payment settles, not when the client opens checkout. The email follows your own New booking choice under Your notifications.

Two more things apply on top of the price and are managed elsewhere in the dashboard. Discount codes live under Discount codes, and tax rates under Tax. A tax rate can be exclusive, which adds tax on top of the price, or inclusive, which treats the price as already containing it. Checkout charges one rate, your default, on every paid booking with you, whatever the client's location; there is no matching by country or region. Your first rate becomes the default, and any other rate you keep is not charged until you make it the default.

Deposits

A deposit is a flat amount in your currency, not a percentage. It is charged instead of the full price at booking, and it must be less than the cheapest priced duration on the event type. A discount shrinks the balance rather than the deposit, because discounts and tax apply to the full price.

Calemander never collects the balance. That is settled in person, by design. There is no route, job or button anywhere that charges a remainder, and a saved card cannot be used for one either. What Calemander does is tell everybody what is owed: the same sentence appears on the confirmation email, the reminder email, the payment success page and your schedule, in the form Deposit paid $15.00 · $25.00 due at your appointment.

The booking page says it before the card is entered, as two labelled lines rather than one — Total $40.00 over Due now $15.00, with the remainder named as due at the appointment. A plain price and Free stay on one line, as does each row in the embedded list of event types, where there is only room for one.

If the booking is later refunded by a percentage, the percentage is taken of what was actually paid, which is the deposit. A tip is not part of that: see Tips below.

Tips

You can add an optional tip line to your online checkout under Payments → Tips. It is off until you switch it on. Set the percentages you want offered, whether an attendee may type their own amount, and a maximum — the maximum is enforced when the charge is made, not only on the page — and you can turn tips off for individual services. Anything you add later is included automatically.

The tip rides the same charge as the booking and lands in your own Stripe or Square account. It appears as its own line on the hosted payment page and on the attendee's receipt, so nobody sees one unexplained larger number.

Four things are worth knowing, because each of them is a decision rather than an accident:

• Nothing is preselected. The attendee sees a No tip button already chosen, and has to pick something else to leave one.
• The percentage is of the service price, before any discount and before tax, and the page says so out loud — 20% of $100.00. A discount code shrinks what you charge; it does not shrink the gratuity.
• Tips are added after tax, so they are not taxed.
• Deposit checkouts are not asked by default. Switch Also ask on deposit checkouts on if you want them to be. When you do, the percentages are of the full service price rather than of the deposit, because 20% of a $20 deposit on a $100 service would offer $4.

A tip is part of what was charged, so a full refund returns it. On a partial refund the tip comes back in full and the percentage applies to the service alone — a gratuity is for work that did not happen.

This is not in-person tipping. There is no card reader, no staff tip rate and no split between staff. Checkout in the chair stays exactly as it is today. Tips are also not offered where there is no charge to ride: a held-card booking, a recurring series, a booking paid with a package credit or covered by tuition, one collected on your own site, or a free booking.

Card on file, and no-show or late-cancel fees

In Hold a card mode the attendee saves a card through the provider's own hosted page at booking and pays nothing. They also agree to a policy sentence Calemander generates from your settings and stores on the booking, so a later edit to the event type cannot rewrite what they agreed to. It reads like this:

No charge today. A $25.00 fee applies if you cancel less than 24 hours before your appointment or miss it.

The event type carries four settings:

• No-show fee — required, and it cannot exceed the price.
• Late-cancellation fee — optional. Left blank, the no-show fee is used for both.
• Late-cancellation window — hours before the start, 24 by default.
• No-show grace — minutes, 60 by default. See below.

How a fee actually gets charged

The two reasons behave differently, and it is worth being exact about which is which.

A late cancellation is charged immediately. When the attendee cancels their own booking from inside the window, the cancellation stands and the fee is charged to the saved card in that same request. A decline after that point does not un-cancel the booking. A host cancelling a card-on-file booking never charges a fee.

A no-show is charged automatically, after the grace period. When you mark a booking as a no-show, Calemander schedules the fee for the grace period ahead — 60 minutes unless you changed it — and the booking's detail pane shows it counting down. During that window you can press Waive to cancel it, or Charge now to take it early, and taking the no-show mark back waives it too. Once the grace period passes, a background runner charges the card without anyone pressing anything.

A failed charge is the one place a person has to act. There are no automatic retries: a failed fee offers Retry, which attempts the saved card again, and Send pay link, which emails the attendee a hosted checkout for the amount. A charged fee offers Refund. A fee can only ever be charged once, whether it was the runner or a click that did it.

One case is skipped deliberately. If the booking was paid for with a package credit and the event type is set to let a no-show consume that credit, no fee is scheduled — the credit is the penalty, and billing both would read as being charged twice.

The card saved for one booking can be reused. Calemander copies it up to the contact record, so that contact's next card-on-file booking confirms without a second hosted page. The attendee can still choose Use a different card, and a card that declined for good is not offered again.

Packages and prepaid credits

A package is a bundle of prepaid booking credits sold as one product. You create them under Packages: a name, a number of credits, a price, an optional expiry in days, and whether the pack covers every event type or only some. Each pack has a Listed toggle. Unlisted is not the same as inactive — an unlisted pack is still buyable by direct link, it is only kept off the public packages page.

Customers buy from your public packages page, which lists everything currently listed. Checkout runs through whichever of Stripe or Square you have connected. A pack becomes usable when the payment lands, which is also when its expiry clock starts. A checkout nobody finishes stops being payable shortly after 30 minutes. The customer pays the price shown when they started checkout, even if you change the pack's price while they are paying.

At booking, an attendee who has proved their email address is offered their remaining credits. One credit covers the booking, the booking confirms outright, and no card is involved. Calemander refuses a credit whose per-credit value is below the booking's price, whose pack does not cover that event type, or whose pack has expired, and it says which. Credits are not offered for add-ons, series bookings, tuition-covered bookings or card-on-file event types.

Nothing sweeps expired packs; the date is read when a credit is spent, and not before. An expired pack still shows on the attendee's manage page so there is an answer to "why can't I book?". You can extend a purchase's expiry or return a credit a no-show burned, and both are logged.

There is no way to refund a package purchase from Calemander today. If you need to, do it in your Stripe dashboard.

Recurring tuition

Tuition billing charges a payer monthly, and their lessons are then covered without a checkout each time. It is a Pro feature, and it needs Stripe.

Under Tuition you create a plan — a name, a monthly amount, and which event types it covers — then create an enrollment against a payer's email address. That gives you a Stripe checkout link to send them. There is no public sign-up page; you send the link. Monthly is the only billing interval.

Once the subscription is active, a booking made with that payer's email address on a covered event type confirms outright and Stripe is not involved in the request. A plan can cap how many bookings a period includes; usage is counted per billing period, and a host cancelling a booking gives the visit back. If a payment fails, coverage continues for a seven-day grace period and then stops. Cancelling an enrollment leaves coverage running to the end of the paid period.

Pausing, resuming and cancelling an enrollment, and sending the payer a billing-portal link to fix their card, all keep working even if your own Calemander subscription lapses. Those are the actions that stop money moving, and they should never be behind a paywall.

Refunds and cancellation outcomes

Each priced event type has a When a booking is cancelled setting with three choices:

• Refund per the policy below — money back to the attendee's card.
• Rebooking credit — you keep what they paid and they get a link to book another time at no extra cost.
• Nothing — no refund, no credit.

Alongside it sit three numbers:

• They must cancel at least N hours before the start. Less notice than that and the payment is kept in full. The default is 24 hours.
• Refund percentage, taken of what was actually paid for the service, not of the list price. A tip is not part of that percentage — it is returned in full.
• Credit valid for N days, 30 by default. Credits already issued keep the expiry they were issued with.

All three are saved whichever outcome you pick, so switching between them does not throw away your policy. The editor prints the sentence your attendees will actually see underneath, and that sentence is the thing to check.

Who cancelled matters, but only for credits. When the attendee cancels, the notice window applies: cancelling inside it forfeits the money. When you cancel, the window is skipped for a rebooking credit — the attendee is made whole however late it is. A refund has no such exemption: the window and the percentage apply whoever cancelled, so cancelling a refund-policy booking with less notice than the window refunds nothing. Your cancel dialog names the amount and which of the two is about to happen before you confirm it. A refund and a credit can never both happen for one booking — issuing a refund revokes an unredeemed credit.

When a refund is issued, the attendee is emailed the amount alongside the cancellation notice, so a booking you cancel on their behalf does not leave them guessing about their money. A credit sends its own email carrying the rebooking link.

A credit is a link of the form /rebook/<token>, worth what was paid, pinned to the event type it came from, and spendable once. You can see every credit you have issued under Credits and re-send the link from there, and you can issue one by hand from a paid cancelled booking. If the price went up in the meantime, the rebooking still costs nothing extra.

One quirk to know about. Choosing Nothing turns the older auto-refund switch off, and that switch's off position means "refund in full regardless of notice" — so a card-paid booking still gets a full refund. Read the generated sentence in the editor rather than the radio label.

Bringing your own checkout

If you already take payment on your own site, Calemander can reserve the time against that payment instead of charging for it. You mark one requirement on the event type as the one your checkout reserves against, mint a claim through the API, embed the booker inside your own flow, and report the payment when it settles. The booking is held meanwhile and confirms when you report. Calemander never touches the money, and never refunds it, because it never held it. The full contract is in the API reference, and the holding behaviour is described in Requirements and holds.

Which plan you need

The two Pro rows are gated on the moment you switch them on, and on nothing else. If your subscription lapses, an event type already holding cards keeps holding them, fees already scheduled still charge, and every enrolled family keeps their coverage. What a lower plan refuses is putting a new event type into card-on-file mode, or creating a new tuition plan or enrollment. A dispute between you and Calemander should not take anything from someone who is not party to it.

Related

• Billing and plans — what you pay Calemander, which is a different thing.
• Requirements and holds — holding a time while something else clears.
• Managing bookings — cancelling, and marking a no-show.
• API reference — the bring-your-own-checkout contract.

Last checked 2026-09-24.