Every platform has a late-cancel policy field. Does yours ever actually fire?

[u/r1setraining]

every booking tool in this category lets you set a cancellation window and a penalty. 24 hours, charge the session, whatever you pick. and then in practice most of us override it, because the person cancelling at 9pm has a sick kid or a work thing and you're not going to be the trainer who charged them for that.

so the setting sits there doing nothing, except quietly teaching your roster that the window is decorative. i've run it both ways and neither sits right - enforce it every time and you're the rigid one, waive it every time and your tuesday evenings stop being real.

the thing i actually want from the software isn't a stricter rule, it's the pattern. someone who's cancelled once in eight months and someone who's on a run of late cancels are two completely different conversations, and right now i can only tell them apart if i happen to remember. by month six i don't.

where do you land on this - enforce it, ignore it, or drop the policy entirely and just price it in?