Cancellation & No Show Tracker Spreadsheet | Notice Period Cost Excel Google Sheets Template | Booking Cancellation Policy Calculator

📅 CANCELLATION & NOTICE TRACKER — EXCEL & GOOGLE SHEETS

Everybody records the cancellation. The value comes off the forecast, somebody
sighs, and that is the end of it.

Almost nobody writes down when they were told.

Which is a pity, because that is the only part of a cancellation you can
actually do anything about.

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NINE LINKED TABS

· Start Here — what each tab expects and where to type.
· Setup — eight numbers, and three short lists you name yourself.
· Cancellations — one row per booking that did not happen. Two dates and six
things typed, the rest worked out.
· The Whole Year — what a year of them cost, after everything you got back.
· By Notice — the tab this file exists for.
· By Reason — which reasons come early and which come on the morning.
· By Space — which room, chair, van or practitioner loses the most.
· Price Of Notice — one cancellation, priced at every length of notice.
· Overview — the whole year on one screen.

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FROM THE WORKED YEAR INSIDE THE FILE

Four spaces. 214 cancellations. One year.

What they were worth $338,030
Gross profit at risk $209,579
Slots you refilled 62
Deposits you kept $57,203
WHAT YOU GOT BACK $112,631
Hours spent trying to refill (546) $18,553
WHAT IT COST YOU $115,502
Of the gross profit at risk 55.1%
The average cancellation $540

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0%. AND 82%.

The share of cancellations refilled when they arrived on the day, and the share
refilled when they arrived two months out.

Same rooms. Same year. Same people ringing round. The only thing that changed
was how much warning they were given.

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THE LADDER IN BETWEEN

On the day 50 cancellations 0% refilled
A day's notice 51 10%
Two or three days 18 17%
Four days to a week 22 27%
One to two weeks 15 40%
Two to four weeks 24 63%
One to two months 23 78%
More than two months 11 82%

Eight bands, and you name them yourself. If your terms turn on fourteen days,
put a boundary at fourteen and the file will argue about the right number.

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LOOK AT THE SECOND ROW

Fifty-one cancellations arrived with one day's warning. Five of them were
refilled.

As a share of the money at risk, they cost more than the ones that arrived on
the morning — because a day feels like enough time to save the slot, so you
spend three times as long trying. 157 hours of the year went on that band alone.

Twenty-four hours is not notice. It is an apology.

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THE TAB THIS FILE EXISTS FOR

Price Of Notice takes one cancellation and prices it at every length of notice
you might be given.

$693 if they tell you on the day. $641 with a day. $512 with a week. $330 with
three weeks. $324 with a month.

So a cancellation that arrives late instead of early costs you $316 more, every
single time, and until somebody has worked that out a cancellation policy is
only an opinion.

It runs on two numbers you type in Setup — the share you refill with a month's
notice and the share you refill with a week's — and it works before you have
typed a single row.

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THE FIRST WEEK IS WORTH MORE THAN THE FOURTH

The share you refill is not a straight line, and the file does not pretend it
is. It fits the curve between your two rates.

The gap between a day and a week is worth many times the gap between three weeks
and a month. That is not obvious, and it is the difference between a cancellation
window that changes behaviour and one that only annoys people.

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24 DAYS. OR 2.9 DAYS.

Average notice, by reason. In the worked year the people who changed their minds
told this business three and a half weeks out. Weather told them on the Tuesday.

The reason is not the point. What the reason does to your calendar is.

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WHAT YOU ACTUALLY TYPE

Two dates: when they told you, and what it was booked for. Then the space, the
reason, what it was worth, what it refilled for, the deposit you kept and the
hours you spent trying.

The notice given, the band it falls in, the gross profit at risk, what you got
back, what the chasing cost and what it finally cost you are all worked out on
the row, where you can see them.

Every rate comes from Setup, so changing one reprices the whole year.

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WHAT YOU GET

Two workbooks and a guide. One workbook has the year above already filled in, so
you can see what every column expects before you touch anything. The second is
the same file completely blank — same nine tabs, same formulas — ready for your
own cancellations from the first row. The guide is a plain-English PDF.

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EXCEL AND GOOGLE SHEETS

Built as .xlsx. Excel 2016 or newer on Windows or Mac, and Google Sheets through
File → Import → Upload. LibreOffice too. No macros, no add-ons, no account to
create, nothing to install, no subscription. You download a file and it is yours.

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QUESTIONS PEOPLE ACTUALLY ASK

We are a salon, not a venue.
Then a space is a chair and a booking is an appointment. The arithmetic does not
care what you sell time in. Clinics, studios, tutors, hire firms, consultants,
photographers, holiday lets and trades all work the same way.

We do not take deposits.
Leave the deposit column at zero and the file simply shows what the notice is
worth without one. That comparison is usually the argument for taking them.

We do not record the hours we spend rebooking.
Nobody does. An honest half-hour estimate per cancellation, put in as you go,
beats a precise number that does not exist.

How do we get the two refill rates for Setup?
Estimate them to start with. After a year in By Notice you will replace them with
what actually happened, and the last tab sharpens with them.

What counts as a postponement?
Whatever you decide. Most people put it in as a cancellation with the original
value and then record what it refilled for when the new date is taken. The file
handles both the same way.

Does it hold personal data?
No. Bookings, spaces and amounts. There are no customer names anywhere in it.

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WHAT THIS IS NOT

Not a booking system, a diary or a CRM. Not connected to anything — nothing
syncs, nothing logs in. It does not know your calendar, your contracts or your
customers. It cannot tell you what your terms may lawfully say; that is a
question for somebody qualified to answer it where you are.

It will not stop people cancelling. It will tell you what a day of notice is
worth before you write the terms.

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Sold through my Etsy shop, ThePlainLedger, so the download, the payment and the
buyer protection are all handled by Etsy. I never ask for access to anything —
no password, no accounts login, no bank feed. You download a file; that is the
whole transaction.

The example business, its spaces and its figures are invented. The arithmetic
behind every number is not.