The booking lifecycle
Every state a booking passes through, and what each one means for you.
What a player does
This is the usual route in. You can also add a player yourself, which skips all of it.
They open your booking page, pick a session, say how many are coming and enter their contact details, then pay on the hosted checkout page. They do not create an account.
The price they see is calculated on the server from your service and session, so it always matches what you set.
Booking states
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Pending | The spot is held while checkout is open. Not paid yet. |
| Confirmed | Payment went through. This is a real booking. |
| Cancelled | Called off, by you. |
| No-show | They booked, they paid, they did not turn up. You set this. |
| Expired | The hold timed out before payment completed. The spot is back. |
A pending booking holds capacity so two people cannot buy the same last spot at once. If checkout is abandoned, the hold times out and the booking becomes Expired, which is deliberately distinct from Cancelled: expired means nobody ever paid, cancelled means a real booking was called off.
Where a booking came from
Most bookings start with a player on your booking page. You can also add one yourself, from a session's roster: see Add a player yourself. Each booking says which it is, as Booked online or Added by you.
It matters because Pending means two different things depending on the answer:
| A pending booking is | And it will | |
|---|---|---|
| Booked online | a checkout somebody opened and has not finished | time out on its own and become Expired |
| Added by you | a player who is coming and has not paid yet | hold its spot until you cancel it |
So a pending booking somebody started online is usually nothing: they wandered off, and the spot comes back by itself. A pending booking you added is a real reservation, and the money is worth chasing. Nothing expires it, because there is no checkout behind it to lapse, so cancelling is the only thing that frees the spot again.
The move from Pending to Confirmed happens when the processor tells Arvald the payment succeeded, not when the player clicks pay. It is normally a second or two. The player's return page waits for it.
Payment states
A booking and its payment are separate things, and they do not always say the same story.
| State | Shown as |
|---|---|
PAID | Paid |
PENDING | Unpaid |
REFUNDED | Refunded |
PARTIALLY_REFUNDED | Partly refunded |
FAILED | Failed |
The one to understand: a refunded booking stays Confirmed unless you also cancelled it. That is why booking rows show the payment state alongside the booking state whenever the payment adds something the booking state does not already say. A row reading "Confirmed, Refunded" is a lesson you have paid back but not called off, which may well be what you intended.
Nothing about a booking is emailed
No booking email is sent to anyone. Not to the player when they book, not to you when someone books, not when anything is cancelled or refunded.
The one email Arvald sends is the six-digit sign-in code a player uses to reach their own bookings list, and that is nothing to do with any particular booking. Nobody is told anything about a booking unless you tell them.
So check the dashboard rather than your inbox, and assume anyone who needs to know something needs to hear it from you.