Credit Refunds
Until this release, regardless of your cancellation policy, bookings made with credits always had their credits refunded when the customer canceled. This meant that you would have manually had to deduct a credit from the user if you wanted to enforce your cancellation policy. No more. From today, it is possible for you change your Credit Bundle settings so that credits will only be returned to the client, if they have cancelled with enough notice. However, for existing clients, you must turn this feature on if you want your credit refunds to adhere to your cancellation policy. By default, the behaviour will stay the same in that credits will always be refunded, regardless of your cancellation policy. For more information, see the below video.
Additional Receipt Message
For a long time, it has been possible for you to enable Automatic PDF Receipts. However, some of our clients gave us feedback that they needed a way to add class-specific information to the automatically generated receipts. We are therefore happy to introduce the Additional Receipt Message. It provides a means for you to specify information that will appear on your automatic receipts, but only for the class you want. For more information, see the below video.
Credit Reduction
It is likely that having introduced Credit Refunds we have reduced the need for this change. However, there was some untidy functionality when it came to Editing Purchased Credit Bundles. Specifically, when reducing the number of credits on a purchased bundle. Previously, if you wanted to deduct a credit from a client that was in possession of a Credit Bundle, you would reduce the original quantity of credits on the bundle. For example, if they had a 10 class pass, and you manually deducted one credit, you would have no record of why it was reduced by 1. You would only see the original quantity change from 10 to 9. Now, when you deduct a credit from a client, you need to enter in a reason and this reason, with this deduction, will be displayed to the client when they view their credit usages.
Updated Terms and Conditions
Two new terms have been added. Over the coming days, when you login you will be required to accept these updated terms should you wish to contunue using our system. These behaviours have been present since our system first went live, but we need to ensure they are listed publicly.
New Term 1
Credit Bundles AKA Class Passes are the term used to denote that a client can pay a group of your services in one transaction. If you enable this feature, the client may then redeem these credits when booking your services.
New Term 2
With BookingHawk.com, booking/purchase is a two-step process. The first step is that the payment is taken from the clients card by Stripe. When Stripe indicates that the payment was successful, BookingHawk.com saves the details and sends confirmation emails etc. At the point of Stripe notifying us the payment succeeded, the process can encounter problems. When such failures happen, the payment succeeds, but the booking/purchase fails. The user is informed that something went wrong and they do not get a confirmation email. They are prompted to try again. At this point, there is a payment in Stripe, but no corresponding/matching booking/purchase in BookingHawk.com. This scenario is rare but it is one we must live with – from time to time two software systems communicating with each other will encounter issues. Within a short period of time (typically three hours), an auditing job in BookingHawk.com identifies the payment with no corresponding booking/purchase and issues a refund. In many cases, because the refund happens so soon after the payment, what will happen is that the transaction disappears entirely from the clients bank statement as if it never happened. The important point to understand here is that when the client does not show in your BookingHawk.com account, then the booking/purchase did not succeed and if any payment was taken, it will be refunded. If you have any questions about an individual booking/purchase, please feel free to contact us with the details and we will investigate and clarify.
Other Features, Fixes and Enhancements 2024
Features
- Issue Gift Vouchers
- Class Name now included on Automatic Receipts
- Reduce Value Of Gift Voucher
- Apple Pay is now supported
Feature Enhancements
- Bundle with nearest expiry date will be used when just one credit is consumed by booking
- Receipts no longer issued for bookings made with credits or gift vouchers
- On the event public page, instead of displaying all of your classes/events at once, more classes/events are loaded dynamically as the user scrolls down. This improves the loading speed of the page and reduces load on the system
- The date and time that a booking was created is now included in data exports
- User is brought to a branded 404 page if they attempt to navigate to a page that does not exist
- Cancellation date and time now tracked in the database to enhance visibility without having to cross examine cancelled bookings with Stripe
- Default session timeout duration increased to avoid as many failed saves when creating a new class/event
- Customers view of used credits now more intuitive
- Credit Bundles are automatically archived and no longer show in available options when setting valid bundles on ticket categories once they meet the following creiteria: no longer on sale, all purchased are either used or expired
- System better handles unauthorized attempts to access pages. These can be legitamite attemots to access the dashboard. For example, if the user has bookmarked a page in their dashboard and attempts to navigate to it before logging in
Technical Enhancements
- Migrated our systems to a newer version of Spring Boot to improve the performance, scalability, security and extendability of the system
- TLS protocol used in all emails sent by the system to improve security
- Stripe API version updated to improve security
- Number of false errors printed to our system logs has been reduced by >90% to ensure that anything that goes wrong in the system is reviewed and fixed
- Changes to how Collection objects are used within our codebase to enhance memory usage and thus system performance
- Changes to how our ‘auto populate’ search index is rebuilt to avoid heavy resource consumption which had the potential to impact system performance during business hours for our Asia/Pacific based users
- New authorization system deployed which improves security
- Instructions on killing long running/slow query added
Fixes
- Reducing amount of credits remaining on a bunlde for a client to zero, no longer changes the credit quantity to unlimited
- No more rare errors for updating search tag when a customer is booking but already exists for a different business
- Fix for rare issue where one person reservation blocks others
- Removed business search from header and individual business search page
- Google Calendar integration fix
- Order of appearance fixed for bookable assets in appointment pages
- Fix for scrolling to end of event list and all disapearing
- When loading more classes due to scroll, the spinner now shows to stop user accidentially clicking on class that appears
- Closing places for an event which had previously been on a different date with closures now unites the closure and no longer causes a page load issue
- Customer clicking verify link in email more than once causes 500 to appear on UI
- Merging two customer records would leave an ‘Anonymous Customer’ cancelled booking in events/classes where the overritten record once was, this is now fixed
- Fix for Class Link hidden when business information updated for event only business
- Fix for Gift Voucher button dissapearing if business-info page is saved (event only)
- Logo uploader fixed and upgraded
- Eliminated timed out payment with booking failures
- Class passes cannot have a price of 0
- Moving a client from class A to class B and then deleting class A no longer deletes the ticket category from Class A and thus means class B can be ‘VIEW/BOOK’ in dashboard
- Pay as you go event occurrances listed chronologically in dashboard. Therefore, when the business owner adds an earlier time to a class it no longer shows up after original later times