Running your bookings

Booking requests arrive as notifications, in-app, push, and email, depending on your settings, and each one is for a slot inside the availability you opened. You have 48 hours to accept or decline before the request expires. Accepting confirms the booking in one step; a conversation with the customer is created automatically alongside every request.

How fast should you answer? Faster than 48 hours, and here is the concrete reason: your response rate and typical response time are calculated from your history and shown to customers on your profile. A pro who answers within the hour and a pro who answers on day two look different on paper, before a customer reads a single review.

Three things follow from that:

• Answer even when the answer is no. A quick decline keeps your stats healthy and frees the customer to book someone else. Letting a request expire is the worst outcome: it counts against you, and the customer waited two days for silence.
• Turn notifications on properly. Enable push for bookings in both your device settings and Surrounders Settings. A request you never saw still expires on schedule.
• Use the chat. If you need details before committing, the price for a quote-based service, the size of the job, ask in the conversation. Asking a question within the hour reads as professional; it does not pause the 48-hour window, so come back and give a final answer.

Customers can send requests to several pros in parallel, which means speed is not just a statistic - the first useful reply often gets the job. Treat request notifications the way you treat a ringing phone.

Open the booking request and choose accept or decline. Accepting confirms the booking in one step: the customer is notified immediately, the slot is locked in both calendars, and there is nothing else to do until the session. Declining also notifies the customer right away, so they can book someone else. Requests you ignore expire after 48 hours.

Accept when the time, place, and job work for you. Because acceptance equals confirmation, only accept what you genuinely intend to do. There is no second confirmation step, the customer will plan around it from that moment. If you need details first, ask in the chat that opens with every request, then accept once you are sure.

Decline without guilt when the request does not fit. A quick decline is a service to the customer: they find out in minutes instead of waiting two days, and they are free to request other pros in parallel anyway. Declining does not damage you the way silence does, answered requests, including declines, keep your response rate healthy. A one-line reason in chat ("too far for me that day", "fully booked this week") turns a decline into a good impression, and good impressions come back.

Never just let it sit. An expired request is the worst of all outcomes: the customer waited 48 hours for nothing, and your response rate, which customers see on your profile, records the miss.

One prevention tip: requests can only come from slots you opened. Keep your weekly availability honest and block dates you are away, and most requests will be ones you want to accept.

A recurring request arrives as one decision: accept or decline the whole series. Accept it, and every session, weekly or every 2 weeks, up to 6 months ahead, becomes a confirmed booking in your calendar immediately. No per-session approvals, no weekly admin. For a pro, that is the closest thing to a predictable income base this work offers: one yes, months of scheduled sessions.

A few things to know before that yes:

• Each weekday can have its own time. A customer might book Monday at 18:00 and Thursday at 19:30 in the same series. Check every day-time pair in the request, not just the first one.
• All sessions land as confirmed bookings at once. Your calendar fills for the whole series the moment you accept, so make sure the pattern genuinely fits before committing.
• Your blocked dates handle themselves. Going away for a week? Block those dates in your availability. Any series session falling on a blocked date is automatically cancelled and the customer is notified. The session is skipped, not rescheduled, and the rest of the series continues untouched.
• Each session is its own booking. It gets its own reminders, completes individually, and can be reviewed individually. Complete each one as you go so your stats and the customer's review window stay current.

Series do not renew automatically. Near the end, a reminder goes out, and continuing means the customer starts a new series, which is a natural moment to confirm the arrangement still suits you both. If things stop working mid-series, you can cancel the remaining sessions, though with a regular customer a chat message first almost always finds a better outcome than a cancellation notice.

Your Customers tab lists every person who has ever booked you, automatically. For each customer you see their name, email, booking count, and full booking history with you, plus a space for private notes that only you can read. Nobody is added by hand and nobody can appear there without having actually booked, one booking is the ticket in.

The tab is essentially a client book that maintains itself. Things it is good for:

• Recognising regulars. The booking count tells you instantly who your repeat customers are, useful when deciding whose reschedule request to bend over backwards for.
• Context before a session. Open the customer, skim the history and your notes, and walk in remembering that their dog hates the doorbell and the gate code is round the back. Details you noted once stay attached to the person.
• Reaching out. You can message customers first, so the tab doubles as the place to reconnect with someone you have not seen in a while. A short personal message to a past customer is far more effective than waiting to be found in search again.

On privacy, the visibility works both ways and is deliberately limited. You see the name and email of people who booked you, that is the standard business relationship. You never see their phone number through the platform, and for at-home services you see the exact address only per confirmed booking. Your notes about a customer are yours alone: the customer cannot see them, other pros cannot see them, and they never appear anywhere public.

Everyone in the tab arrived by choosing you once. The tab is how you get them to choose you twice.

Cancelling a booking notifies the customer immediately, and the booking closes as cancelled in both calendars. Surrounders charges nothing for cancellations, in either direction, because the platform never touches money at all. The real cost is different: every cancellation spends a little of your reliability, and reliability is most of what a service business runs on.

So before cancelling, consider rescheduling. Either side can propose a new time, at least 2 hours ahead and within your availability, and you can adjust the duration too (30, 60, 90, or 120 minutes). The customer re-approves the new slot, and the booking is preserved instead of destroyed. From the customer's side, "can we move to Thursday?" reads completely differently from "cancelled". One keeps the relationship, the other sends them back to search results, where other pros are one tap away.

When you genuinely must cancel:

• Do it as early as possible. A cancellation 3 days out lets the customer replan; one 2 hours out ruins their afternoon.
• Say why in chat. One honest sentence ("family emergency, I'm very sorry") preserves goodwill that a bare notification does not.
• Offer the next slot you can actually keep. Turning a cancellation into a rebooking is the best possible recovery.

There is no penalty system to game here, no fee, no strike counter to worry about. There is just the customer, who will remember how it felt, and who can describe it in a review after your next completed booking together. Pros who cancel rarely and communicate early keep customers for years. That is the whole economics of it.

Your dashboard shows four headline numbers for the current month: earnings, sessions completed, your average rating, and your response rate. Below them sit a 6-month earnings trend and per-service statistics. Everything is calculated from your booking history, so the dashboard is a mirror of your work, not a separate system you manage.

What each part means:

• Monthly earnings is the sum of your completed bookings' listed prices. It is informational: Surrounders never holds or processes money, so this is a running tally of what your completed work was worth, not a balance waiting to be paid out. You collect payment directly from customers.
• Sessions counts bookings that reached "completed" this month.
• Rating is your average across all reviews, with the review count next to it. Customers see the same number.
• Response rate is the share of booking requests you answer in time. Customers see this on your profile too, so it is worth protecting.

The 6-month trend chart shows how earnings moved over time, which is useful for spotting seasonality, a quiet month after holidays, a spike when a new listing landed.

Per-service stats break things down by listing: views, bookings, and revenue for each. If one listing gets plenty of views but few bookings, that is usually a pricing or description problem worth fixing. Customer insights show the mix of recurring, one-time, and new customers, so you can see whether your business is built on regulars or a stream of first-timers.

None of these numbers involve money moving through the platform. They exist to help you run your business, and they update as bookings complete.

When a client cancels, you are notified immediately, and the slot returns to your availability on its own - browsing customers can request it again as long as it is at least 2 hours away. So the platform side is already handled. Filling the slot fast usually comes down to one message to the right person.

That right person is often in your chat history. Most pros have a regular who asked for exactly that time and got "sorry, Tuesday at six is taken". Your Customers tab lists everyone who has booked you, and your private notes are the place where "wants an earlier slot" or "asked about Tuesdays" pays off. One message - "Tuesday 18:00 just opened up, want it?" - fills more cancelled slots than anything else, because it goes to someone who already wanted the time.

Beyond that:

• Leave the slot open. Your listing is live, the freed time shows in your real availability, and a customer browsing tonight can send a request for it.
• Short notice still works. The minimum lead time for a request is 2 hours, so even a same-day cancellation leaves the slot bookable for most of the day.

An honest no: there is no automated waitlist today. Nobody gets auto-notified that a slot freed up, and nothing rebooks it for you - the manual message to a regular is the current best tool. If a waitlist would genuinely help your business, tell [email protected]; feature suggestions are read.

Yes. Any published listing can be paused and unpaused anytime, which is exactly what holidays are for. A paused listing stops taking new booking requests but keeps everything else, its description, photos, reviews connection, and settings, ready for the moment you switch it back on. Pausing takes seconds in either direction.

One warning matters more than the rest of this page: archiving is permanent. Pause and archive sit near each other but do completely different things. Pausing is a switch; archiving is a shredder - an archived listing cannot be restored, and coming back means creating a new listing from scratch. If you are stepping away for two weeks in August, or two months over winter, pause. Archive only a service you are certain you will never offer again.

A few practical notes for going away:

• Pausing handles new requests, but check your calendar for bookings already confirmed during your absence - those are commitments you made, so cancel or reschedule them with the customer directly, with as much notice as you can give.
• If you run recurring series, blocking your holiday dates cancels those sessions automatically and notifies the customers, so blocked dates plus paused listings cover both regulars and newcomers.
• Chat keeps working while paused. A customer who messages during your break and gets a reply, even "back on the 15th", usually waits; one who gets silence books elsewhere.

When you return, unpause and everything resumes as it was. Pausing costs nothing and you can do it as often as life requires - an honest "away" beats an open listing you cannot serve.

Most no-shows are forgotten appointments, not bad intent, and reminders exist for exactly that. Customers pick reminders when they book - 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, or 1 day before, and they can select several at once. You get reminders for the same session too, so both sides hear about it before it happens.

The habits that cut no-shows further:

• Keep work in confirmed bookings, not vague chat agreements. "See you Thursday around five" in a message gets forgotten. A confirmed slot sits on both calendars, triggers reminders, and shows a clear status either side can check.
• Message new clients the evening before. One personal line, "Looking forward to tomorrow at 10, the address is correct?", takes seconds and catches mix-ups while there is still time to fix them. Regulars rarely need it; first-timers often do.
• Mark real no-shows. After a short grace period past the start time, you can mark the booking as a no-show. It closes the booking honestly and keeps your history accurate.
• Use private notes. Only you see them, and "cancelled late twice, confirm the day before" next to a customer's name is exactly what they are for.

There is no trick beyond this. Reminders handle the forgetful majority, a confirmed slot plus a short human message handles most of the rest, and the no-show record plus notes protect you from the rare repeat offender.

Start in chat, escalate only as far as the situation demands. You have 4 tools for difficult customers: the conversation itself, no-show marking, blocking, and reporting, plus your private notes to keep track of it all. Most friction, late changes, haggling after agreement, unclear expectations, dissolves with one direct message. The heavier tools are for when it does not.

Talk first. Misunderstandings outnumber bad actors by a wide margin. "We agreed 60 minutes at the listed price, I can't add rooms at the door" said politely in chat settles most of it, and leaves a written record of what was agreed.

Record what happens. Mark genuine no-shows on the booking after the grace period, they are recorded permanently. Put the rest in your private notes on the customer: repeated last-minute cancellations, payment dodging, boundary-pushing. Only you see the notes, and three months later they save you from re-learning the lesson.

Block when you are done. Blocking is silent, instant, and mutual: no messages, no new bookings, no friend requests, in either direction. The customer gets no notification. Your past history together is kept, and you can unblock later in Settings if you change your mind. You do not owe anyone an explanation, if someone consistently costs you more than they pay, blocking is a business decision, not a drama.

Report serious behaviour. Harassment, threats, discrimination, scam attempts, use the three-dot menu on the profile or conversation, or write to [email protected]. Every report is reviewed, and accounts can be suspended. Reporting also protects the next pro this person books.

You can also review a customer after a completed booking, honestly and factually. Pros review customers too, and the record helps everyone.

You do not need to live in the app. Requests expire after 48 hours, so the real requirement is checking in 2 or 3 times a day and answering whatever arrived - including the requests you will decline. How the rate is calculated is covered in the response rate explainer; this page is about keeping it high with the least effort.

The playbook:

• Turn on push notifications for booking requests. This is the single biggest lever. A request you saw within a minute is easy to answer; a request buried since yesterday is the one that expires.
• Answer everything, even with a no. Declining counts as answering, and a fast "sorry, that week is full" beats silence for your rate and for the customer, who moves on immediately instead of waiting two days.
• Batch it. Morning coffee, after lunch, end of day - fixed check-in moments beat constant glancing. Three short checks comfortably keep every answer inside the same day.
• Aim for same-day, treat 48 hours as the fire alarm. Customers see your typical response time next to the rate. Hour 47 and hour 1 both count as answered, but they do not look the same on your profile.
• Keep your availability calendar honest. Requests only come from slots you opened, so a tidy calendar means fewer requests you would have to decline anyway.

One honest limitation: there is no auto-reply feature today. Nothing answers for you, which is exactly why push plus fixed check-in times is the whole game.

When a customer does not turn up, open the booking and mark it as a no-show. The option becomes available after a short grace period past the scheduled start, a few minutes of lateness is not a no-show. Once marked, it is recorded on the booking as its final status: the booking will not complete, and it stays in the history as what it was.

Before you tap the button, send one message. "Hi, I'm at the address, are you on your way?" costs you 10 seconds and solves the most common cases: the customer is stuck in traffic, mixed up the time, or is standing at the wrong entrance. A regular who overslept once is still a regular. A no-show mark on their booking is accurate but cold, and if the relationship is worth keeping, a reschedule usually serves you better than a record.

When marking a no-show is the right call:

• The grace period has clearly passed and the customer is unreachable.
• You messaged and got silence.
• It has happened before with the same person, patterns deserve records.

What the mark does: it closes the booking honestly, so it never shows as completed work, never enters your earnings figure, and never pretends a session happened. Your time was still lost, and because payment on Surrounders is settled directly between you and the customer, the platform charges nobody anything either way. Whether you ask for compensation for the lost slot is between you and the customer, your cancellation policy on the listing tells customers what notice you expect.

For repeat offenders, the no-show record plus your private notes plus blocking gives you everything you need to protect your calendar.

A confirmed booking follows a simple timeline: it shows as in progress once the session begins, and after the work is done you mark it complete from the booking page. That one tap matters more than it looks: only a completed booking unlocks reviews, updates your dashboard earnings and session count, and closes the booking cleanly for both sides. Do it the same day, ideally right after you finish.

Why completing promptly is worth the habit:

1. Reviews open immediately. The customer can only review a completed booking, and the best moment to receive a review is while the experience is fresh. Every review you accumulate makes the next booking easier to win. You can review the customer too, it works in both directions.
2. Your dashboard stays accurate. The booking's price joins your monthly earnings figure and the session joins your count the moment it completes. Forgetting to complete bookings makes your own numbers lag behind reality.
3. The customer sees a finished timeline. Requested, confirmed, in progress, completed, a clean history builds trust, and it gives the customer a working "Book again" button for next time.

If you do forget, the booking is marked completed automatically some time after the scheduled end, so nothing stays stuck forever. Treat that as a safety net, not the plan, the automatic completion arrives later than your tap would, which delays the review window opening and your stats updating.

If the session did not happen at all, do not mark it complete. Cancel it, or if the customer simply never showed up, use the no-show option instead, so your records reflect what actually happened.

Your response rate is the share of booking requests you answer in time, calculated from your actual history. Requests expire if unanswered for 48 hours, and expired requests hurt the rate. Customers see your response rate and typical response time on your profile, so this number directly affects whether people choose to book you.

The single most important thing to understand: declining counts as answering. A fast, polite decline keeps your rate healthy. Silence does not. If you cannot take a job, say so quickly, the customer moves on to another pro, and your numbers stay clean. Letting a request sit until it expires is the worst outcome for everyone: the customer waits two days for nothing, and your profile records it.

Practical habits that keep the rate high:

• Turn on push notifications for booking requests, so nothing sits unseen.
• Answer everything, even requests you will refuse. "Sorry, I'm fully booked that week" takes ten seconds.
• Keep your availability calendar accurate. Requests only come from slots you have opened, so a tidy calendar means fewer requests you would have to decline anyway.
• Block dates when you are away. No open slots, no requests piling up while you are on holiday.

We do not publish the internal formula, and you do not need it. The principle is simple: respond to requests before they expire, and the number takes care of itself. Alongside the rate, customers also see your typical response time, so answering in an hour looks better than answering at hour 47, even though both count as answered.

Before a holiday, do 4 things: pause your listings, block the dates in your availability calendar, warn your regulars in chat, and note that blocking dates auto-cancels any recurring-series sessions on them. All of it takes minutes, all of it is reversible, and when you return you simply switch everything back on.

The checklist in order:

1. Pause every listing, never archive. Pausing is a switch you flip back when you return. Archiving is permanent - an archived listing cannot be restored, and you would rebuild it from scratch. The full difference is covered in the pausing answer; here the rule is simply: for holidays, pause.
2. Block your away dates in availability. Pausing stops new requests, but blocked dates also clean up your calendar for the period. If you run recurring series, blocking a date automatically cancels that date's sessions and notifies those customers - no awkward messages you forgot to send.
3. Check already-confirmed one-time bookings in that window. Those are commitments; cancel or reschedule them with the customer directly, with as much notice as you can.
4. Tell your regulars in chat. Chat keeps working while you are paused. "Away until the 15th, happy to book you for after" keeps a regular waiting for you instead of trying someone new.

On return, unpause the listings and unblock any leftover dates. Reviews, photos, settings, and your customer history all sit untouched while you are gone.

Private notes are your personal memos inside Surrounders, and exactly one person can read them: you. They come in two kinds, a note on a customer (in your Customers tab) and a note on an individual booking. The customer never sees them, other pros never see them, and they appear nowhere public. They exist so your working knowledge lives next to your calendar instead of in your head.

Customer notes hold the things that stay true across bookings:

• Access details: gate codes, "third floor, bell doesn't work, call instead", parking tips.
• Preferences: products they like, the room to start with, the dog that needs shutting in the kitchen.
• Commercial memory: what you quoted them, agreed discounts, how they usually pay.

Booking notes hold the one-off details for a specific session: "bring the tall ladder", "invoice requested this time", "focus on exam prep, test on Friday".

The habit that makes notes valuable is writing them immediately, thirty seconds after a session or a chat, while the detail is fresh. Six weeks later, when the customer books again, you open their card and greet them like the professional who remembers everything. Customers notice that, and it is one of the quiet things that turns a first booking into a regular arrangement.

Two common-sense cautions. Notes are private but they are still personal data about a real person, so keep them factual and professional, write nothing you would be uncomfortable with the customer reading. And keep genuinely sensitive things like door codes limited to what you actually need for the job. Yesterday's grievance makes a bad note; "prefers morning slots, pays cash" makes a perfect one.

Pausing is reversible, archiving is not - that one sentence is the whole difference. A paused listing stops taking new booking requests and comes back with 1 click, exactly as it was. An archived listing is gone for good: it cannot be restored, unpaused, or edited back to life, and returning to that service means creating a new listing from scratch.

Pause is for anything temporary. Holiday, a busy month at your day job, a full calendar, a season you do not work. The listing keeps its description, photos, and settings, and waits. You can pause and unpause as often as life requires, and it costs nothing.

Archive is for a service you are certain you will never offer again. You stopped doing massage entirely and moved to training only - archive the massage listing. It disappears from your active list and stays gone. If there is any chance you might come back to it, even "maybe next year", pause instead. There is no downside to a listing sitting paused indefinitely.

One reassurance either way: your reviews, rating, and booking history live on your profile, not inside a single listing. Archiving a listing does not erase what customers said about working with you, and a new listing starts with your existing profile reputation behind it. What you lose by archiving is the listing itself - the text, photos, pricing, and settings you would have to rebuild. So when in doubt, pause. Archive only on purpose.