Making payment required means that whenever a client books an appointment for a service or class that has a price or deposit associated with it, they will be prompted to pay that price or deposit before their appointment gets confirmed. Payment Required under Payment Settings is a global settings - this means that if your services have a price assigned to them payment will be required
You can only make payment required if you have one of our payment portals set up. If you don't have a way to accept payments, then having payments required doesn't make much sense!
This setting goes hand in hand with the Confirmation Message that shows a little further down the Payment Settings page. If you have payments marked as required, that means that you'd want the confirmation message to say something like "Your appointment is not yet confirmed. Please submit payment" so that your clients know that the booking process is not yet complete. If you don't have payment marked as required, that means that you'd want your confirmation message to say something more like "Your appointment is confirmed! If you'd like to pay for the appointment now, please use the payment button below". We go into much greater detail on what messages make sense in the confirmation messages section of our documentation, but hopefully that gives you an idea of how Payment Required and the Confirmation Message are tied together!
If you have payment set to required and have the Accept Payment Upon Booking field set to Yes, then a client will by default have 90 minutes to submit payment before their appointment gets cancelled due to non payment. You can modify that amount of time whenever you want by changing the value of the Number of Minutes to Submit Payment field. During the time between when an appointment gets booked and the payment gets entered, we place the appointment in a holding state so no one else can book that timeslot before the client has entered payment. The appointment gets saved with a status of "Pending" and you can locate it under Appointments > Appointment Lists > Pending on your account. You always have the option to override the automatic cancellation for that appointment by changing its status from Pending - Awaiting Payment to Open as shown below -
While on the Payment Settings page, you can toggle the switch next to Payment Required to set the field to "Yes, clients must pay for any services & classes that have a price listed before their appointment is confirmed" or "No, payment is not required when services & classes have a price listed" as shown below -
You should also toggle "Accept Payment Upon Booking" to Yes - this will prompt you client to submit payment in the Confirmation Message -
As mentioned above, depending on what you have set for the Payment Required field, you can change the confirmation message that shows on the Final Confirmation panel of the scheduler to say whatever you want to communicate to your clients. There are actually different confirmation messages that will appear depending on your account settings and the number of appointments being booked by the client - the Payment Optional Confirmation Message (Single Appointment), the Payment Optional Confirmation Message (Multiple Appointments & Course Set Registrations) and the Payment Required Confirmation Message.
Once you've set the Payment Required flag to the value you'd like it to have, click on the green Save button at the top to commit your changes.