glossary · 2026-09-05
Availability, booking and rental
Three records get confused in almost every conversation about booking platforms, and the confusion is expensive: it produces systems that show free time nobody can sell, and spreadsheets where a request and a commitment look identical. These are the definitions this product uses, in ordinary words.
Availability
A calculation, not a record. Availability is the answer to “can this be promised?” at a specific moment, worked out from working hours, existing commitments, the resources a job needs, buffers and the rules you set. It is not stored and it does not exist independently: change a working hour or block a vehicle and yesterday’s answer is no longer true. Anything that shows you a blank square without doing that calculation is showing you a wish.
Request
An expression of interest that has not yet taken anything. A request is visible, can be reviewed and can be refused, and — this is the part that matters — it does not silently remove availability from the customer standing at your counter. Businesses that treat requests as commitments end up with a calendar full of maybes; businesses that ignore them lose the ones that were real.
Booking
A commitment with a status and a history. A booking holds the specific things it needs — a person, a room, a place in a session, a unit, a night — for a defined period, and it records what was agreed: the price at the time, the extras, the version of the rules that was accepted. Its history is the record of what happened to it: confirmed, moved, cancelled, attended, missed.
Rental
A booking that also tracks possession. Everything above applies, and on top of it the item physically leaves and comes back, which adds handover and return: condition, fuel or charge, mileage, the extras that went with it and the deposit that was recorded. If nothing is handed over, it is a resource booking, not a rental — and the difference decides whether your afternoon disagreements are about time or about a scratch.
Capacity, and why it belongs to an occurrence
Capacity is how many can be accepted at once, and it belongs to the specific session, departure or property rather than to the class of thing. “Yoga” has no capacity; Tuesday at seven in the small studio has twelve places. A system that stores capacity on the category will eventually sell a thirteenth place into a room with twelve mats.
Buffer and turnaround
Time consumed by the work around the work: cleaning a room, resetting a court, fuelling a scooter, driving to the next address, writing the notes. It is real, it is unsellable, and it is the single most commonly omitted number in a booking setup. Left out, it is the reason a day that looked possible at nine has become impossible by two.
Refusal
A valid outcome, not an error. When the person, the resource, the place or the rule does not allow a booking, the correct behaviour is to refuse it, name what was missing and leave the previous state untouched. A system that quietly accepts what it cannot deliver is not being helpful; it is moving the failure to the moment when a customer is already standing in front of somebody.
No-show and late cancellation
Two different outcomes that are worth separating. A late cancellation arrived, at a recorded time, under a published rule; a no-show did not arrive at all. Counting them apart is what turns a vague sense that “people mess us around” into a specific decision about a deposit, a notice period or a reminder the evening before.
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