When a change takes effect

You ticked the box, pressed save, went back to the calendar — and nothing looks different. Sometimes that means the setting didn't work. Much more often it means the setting works exactly as intended and you're looking at something that was decided before you changed it.

There are only three answers in this product, and knowing which one you're looking at saves the ten minutes people spend assuming the first.

1. Immediately — anything the screen reads as it draws

Some settings aren't stored on anything. They're consulted every time a screen is painted, so the next reload is the whole story:

• Tip buttons and the tip prompt — the next checkout you open.
• The calendar's slot interval — the grid re-rules itself. Appointments already on it don't move; they were never on the grid, they were at a time.
• What your booking page offers — staff, services, the "Anyone" option.
• Whether receipts name the stylist — for receipts issued from now on.

If one of these looks wrong, it is wrong, and it's worth chasing.

2. From now on — anything scheduled or created

This is the group that surprises people, because nothing about the screen tells you the work already happened.

Reminders are scheduled when the appointment is booked. Both of them, at the offsets in force at that moment. Change your timing and every appointment already in the book keeps the reminders it was given — the card on that screen says so in one line, and it is the single most-missed sentence in Settings. The new timing governs appointments booked or moved from here.

That gives you the lever, too: moving an appointment re-schedules its reminders against today's settings. If one specific booking needs to come onto the new rule, open it and move it a minute.

Auto-add fees land when a sale is started. Turn one on at eleven and the sale that opened at ten doesn't have it. Add it by hand on that cart; every sale after that gets it without anybody thinking about it.

Quiet hours are judged when the reminder is scheduled, in the timezone of the location the appointment is at — so turning quiet hours on today doesn't reach back and delay a reminder that was queued last week.

3. Never, on purpose — anything already issued or agreed

The third group is the one to be glad about, even though it's the one that reads like a bug.

• A receipt keeps the footer, the stylist names and the personalised line it was issued with.
• A cancellation policy a client agreed to keeps the exact wording they saw, stored with their appointment.
• A fee already charged stays as charged, at the amount that applied.
• A message already sent is a message already sent. Rewriting the template changes the next one and nothing else.
• Disabling or deleting a fee takes it off new sales and leaves every past sale exactly as it was.

None of that is caution for its own sake. The value of all four is that they hold up when somebody queries a charge six weeks later: the record says what happened then, not what your settings say now.