No-Show and Cancellation Cost Calculator

An empty slot costs the margin, not the price. On the figures this ships with that is forty-eight dollars, not sixty.

The materials were never used, so they were not lost. The slot was, and the staff were paid either way.

Both of the usual answers are wrong. Booking the whole price overstates it, because you kept the consumables. Booking nothing — which is much commoner, and is what most businesses actually do — pretends an empty chair with a paid member of staff standing next to it is free. The page counts the slots you refill from a waiting list separately, because those genuinely cost nothing at all.

Then it does the part nobody does, which is work out whether a deposit is worth taking.

A deposit recovers money from the people who do not turn up. It also costs you the people who will not book once you ask for one. The first is countable. The second is not, because somebody who decides not to book does not ring up to tell you why — so the page computes exactly what the deposit brings in and states the deterrence it can afford as a threshold instead of inventing a number.

On the seeded figures that threshold is two and a half per cent. Put off more than one booking in forty and the deposit is worse than the problem it was meant to solve. That bar is usually lower than people expect, and it is the uncomfortable part: a policy that feels like it costs nothing is quietly turning away work.

It does not claim deposits eliminate no-shows, and it will not tell you to charge a cancellation fee. What it will do is show you the whole curve, so the decision is made against arithmetic rather than against the last customer who annoyed you.

Staff pay is deliberately not treated as a variable cost of a no-show. You paid it anyway, which is exactly why an empty slot costs more than it feels like at the time.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. A Saturday no-show and a Tuesday one are not the same loss, because one of them could have been refilled.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.