I found the cancelled booking, under a separate customer profile.

I'll never understand why Appointments is a separate system. Whenever someone makes a booking with me the system seems to be creating two profiles for them. Even more strange is that the card info and the booking info are not on the same profile, so when I look at a customer based on the transaction I won't see the booking info.

I tried to fix the problem by merging the customers' two profiles, but then the cancelled booking disappeared entirely from their data.

Please submit a feature request or something. This behavior seems to be a consequence of the usual Appointments funcationality, and not a glitch limited to my single account's information.

@DaoDeJing

Could you tell me a little bit about where you are seeing this duplication? What devices are you making this on? Do you see the duplications in the Appointments App or are you seeing them in the Dashboard as well? Are your customers using a different email when they make a profile? There are a lot of things that can account for duplicate profiles, we'd need to troubleshoot further.

This is on the Dashboard. I don't use the Appointments app, because each booking is actually a class with multiple people paying separately (which the Appointments app cannot handle).

What seems to have happened is the customer paid on a previous visit, despite never having made an appointment first. (They were part of a previous class, but were not the one who made the booking.) This created a customer profile for them, basically containing just their name and the record of their card transacction. But no booking info, because they hadn't made a booking and as far as the Square system was concerned were not asssociated with any bookings. So far, all as expected.

But then, later in the month, they created a new booking - actually making the booking themselves this time. And they used the same credit card for the no-show protection requirement as they had used when paying for service on their previous visit.

Despite them using the same card, Appointments created a new profile for them separate from the existing one with the prior payment information. I know this because when they no-showed, I looked at the customer profile associated with the booking and didn't see any prior payments for that customer. (Perhaps they left out their middle initial or something, which is why Appointments didn't just add the booking to the customer profile already created?)

So I proceeded to charge the no-show fee... and was surprised to see it did NOT appear on the Appointments-associated profile! Not only did the transaction not appear, but any sign of the booking had vanished from the profile.

It then occured to me to search for duplicate profiles. I found the payment profile from her first visit... and on THAT profile is where I found the no-show charge I had just made... as well as the "past appointments" note showing the booking that had vanished from the other profile.

Hopefully this info can help someone figure out what happened behind the scenes. I just wish Appointments could handle classes! That might alleviate some of this confusion.

@DaoDeJing Ahh I see. Thanks for sharing this information. This does make more sense.

1) Since your customer paid for a class the very first time, that creates an Instant Profile. This means that the only information captured from their card payment is their first and last name. 

2) When that same customer booked an appointment on their own later in the month, that likely created another profile. If the customer entered their name in differently than it appears on their card, or if they add in an email address while they're booking, that would have created a duplicate account.

Our system doesn't automatically merge duplicate profiles. You would need to manually merge your customer profiles.

Does this make a bit more sense as to why this might be happening?

I understand why the separate profiles were likely created, however the problem is that transaction information was moved from the profile created when they made a booking. The record of that transaction (and of that booking) were transfered over to the Instant Profile for the customer.

I assume this happened because when the no-show fee was processed the system realized it was the same card used previously on the other profile, and so put the transaction under that profile. The booking itself, too, was moved by the system to the Instant Profile - and both the transaction and the booking no longer appeared under the profile created at the time of booking.

Having the info vanish from the booking profile is a bit confusing for the user, who then needs to think of the possibility of duplicate profiles and go searching for them. But given the circumstances of that info being associated with a previously used payment mothod, I guess it's understandable.

But then, when I merged the profiles, the record of the booking no longer appeared at all. Thankfully the record of the transaction does remain, and the fact that it was a no-show charge is given. But as far as what date/time the booking in question was for, no info is accessable to me any longer.

Not sure what can be done about it, but it'd be nice if transactions and booking histories weren't stripped from profiles like that.

It'd also be nice if cancelled and no-show bookings weren't removed from the calendar completely, as looking up information on recent cancellations is a task I frequently do. Having to look back through the messages Appointments sent me to find the customer names, then go looking in their profile(s) to locate the booking info, is rather tedius.

Thanks for listening!

@DaoDeJing Well I will say it's odd that the booking history disappeared after you merged the profiles. That sounds like a glitch!

I do hear you about the no-show bookings not being automatically removed from the calendar, though. I'm a very visual person so I get it! I'll make sure this feedback gets to our team.

At this point I'd suggest contacting our Appointments team to see if they can dig into why your customer appointment history is disappearing after merging profiles. Directory issues can get pretty complex, and usually it's much easier for a team member to look at this information with you!