Bookings and the Session Lifecycle
Bookings is the page you will actually live in. It holds every session at every stage, and the actions you take here are the ones that move money.
What you will learn
- The states a session moves through, and who moves it
- The difference between session status and payment status
- When to decline, cancel, or mark a no-show
- Why an unpaid booking never reaches your queue
The page#
Bookings lists every session with the mentee's name, their contact details, the date and time, the session type and its duration, and two badges - one for the session, one for the payment. Filters narrow by upcoming or past, and by status.
The two badges are independent
A session can read Confirmed while its payment still reads Pending. They describe different things and they move on different triggers - do not read one as a proxy for the other.
The states#
| Status | Who sets it | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Pending | The mentee, by booking | Waiting on you to confirm or decline |
| Confirmed | You | Agreed and scheduled; the slot is held |
| In progress | The system | The session is running |
| Completed | You | It happened; this is what makes it earnable |
| Cancelled | Either side | Called off; refund rules depend on when |
| No show | You | The mentee never joined |
| Rescheduled | Either side | Moved to a new time |
| Expired | The system | A booking that was never paid for and ran past its start time |
Your three decisions#
Confirm
You are taking the session. The slot is held, the mentee is told, and it moves to your upcoming list. This is the default action for anything you can make.
Decline
You are not the right person, or you cannot make it. Do this early - the slot is released and the mentee can rebook with someone else while it still matters to them.
Cancel
You had confirmed and now cannot. Costlier than declining because the mentee planned around it, and refund rules apply based on how close to the session you are.
Declining is not rude
A fast decline with a one-line reason is far better for a founder than a slow confirm followed by a cancellation. Say what you are not useful for and, if you can, who is.
After the session#
- 1
Mark it complete
This is the step that turns a session into an earning. Add your notes while it is fresh - the mentee sees them and it is a large part of what they paid for.
- 2
Or mark a no-show
If they never joined, record it rather than leaving it open. It protects your side of any refund conversation and keeps your analytics honest.
- 3
The earning appears
A completed paid session creates an earning record, which then works through the ledger before becoming withdrawable.
Nothing settles until you complete it
A session that happened but was never marked complete stays open forever. It does not create an earning, it does not count in your stats, and it quietly makes your dashboard wrong.
Why unpaid bookings do not reach you#
A booking is created the moment a mentee picks a slot, but it sits unpaid until payment clears. Unpaid bookings are deliberately kept out of your action queue - you should not be confirming sessions nobody has paid for.
- A booking with payment still pending does not appear in your pending queue
- It stays visible in the full Bookings list, so nothing is hidden from you
- If payment never completes, the booking expires on its own once the start time passes
Its payment has not cleared. The queue is for sessions genuinely awaiting your decision; an unpaid booking is awaiting the mentee, not you.
Reschedule rather than cancelling and rebooking - it keeps the payment and the history attached to the same session. Note that reschedules are limited, so a mentee who keeps moving will eventually be refused.
The dashboard counts completed sessions. Anything you never marked complete is missing from it. Work through your past sessions and close them out.
