What happens when a reservation leaves the Bright Horizons portal

A Bright Horizons reservation doesn't only disappear when a family cancels. It can leave the portal in four different ways, and each one usually needs a different response from your team. A cancelled booking might be chargeable under your cancellation policy. A booking the family quietly filled somewhere else probably isn't. A booking that vanishes from the Scheduled tab without warning, after you've already assigned a caregiver, is a very different problem to one that disappears before anyone was booked.

Enginehire lets you give each of these its own shift job status, so you can tell them apart at a glance and follow up on each appropriately. This article explains the four situations and how to configure them.

Bright Horizons calls these reservations; Enginehire calls the resulting record a booking or a shift job. They're the same thing.

The four situations

What happened in the portal	Setting that controls it
The family cancelled. The reservation moves to the Unavailable tab with a portal status of Cancelled.	Status to update job to if it is in the Unavailable tab in BH (status in BH: Cancelled)
The family filled the booking another way. The reservation moves to the Unavailable tab with a portal status of Confirmed Elsewhere.	Status to update job to if it is in the Unavailable tab in BH (status in BH: Confirmed Elsewhere)
The reservation disappeared from the Available tab without being cancelled. Nobody had been assigned to it yet.	Status to update job to if it is removed from the available tab of BH portal
The reservation disappeared from the Scheduled tab without being cancelled. A caregiver had already been assigned.	Status to update job to if it is removed from the scheduled tab of BH portal

The first two both live in the Unavailable tab, which is why their setting names look almost identical. The difference is the status Bright Horizons gives the reservation once it lands there, and it's a meaningful one: cancelled means the family no longer needs care, while confirmed elsewhere means they still do and simply didn't use you for it.

The last two are the quiet ones. The reservation isn't marked as anything in the portal, it just isn't there any more. Whether that matters depends entirely on which tab it left. A booking leaving the Available tab is usually harmless. A booking leaving the Scheduled tab means a caregiver is expecting to work a shift that no longer exists, and somebody needs to tell them.

Choosing a status for each

Any shift job status you've set up can be used here, and most agencies create dedicated ones so these jobs are easy to filter for later. A common setup gives cancelled bookings a Cancelled status and confirmed-elsewhere bookings a Confirmed Elsewhere status, matching what the portal calls them.

If you need to create a status first, see Add and customize shift job statuses and colors.

Where to find these settings

All four live in the backup care assistant settings window. To open it, see How to edit the backup care assistant settings. Scroll down past the field mappings and you'll find the four settings together.

What happens if you leave one empty

Leaving one of these empty doesn't mean nothing happens. Most of them fall back on another setting, and it's worth knowing which before you decide to skip one.

If Confirmed Elsewhere is empty, the Cancelled setting is used in its place. Bookings the family filled elsewhere will be given the same status as cancelled bookings, which is fine if you don't need to tell them apart.

If the Cancelled setting is itself empty, the assistant will not update cancelled jobs in the Unavailable tab at all. They'll stay in whatever status they were in, with nothing to indicate the family has cancelled. This is the one to watch: if you leave Cancelled empty, you're not choosing a different status, you're choosing no status change.

Protecting a status you've already set

List of job statuses which will not be changed to the above status when the job is removed from the BH portal stops the assistant overwriting work you've already done.

This matters if your team tracks portal cancellations with their own statuses. Say a coordinator has already reviewed a cancelled booking and moved it to a status of your own — add that status to this list and the assistant will leave it alone from then on, rather than resetting it the next time it checks the portal.

Cancellation policy

Check cancelation policy if a job is removed from the scheduled tab of BH portal applies your agency's cancellation policy when a scheduled reservation is pulled. This is what decides whether the cancellation is chargeable, which is why it applies to the Scheduled tab specifically — a booking that leaves before anyone was assigned generally isn't billable, while one pulled at short notice after a caregiver was scheduled often is.

If you use care.com

care.com handles this differently and has its own status for reservations that are no longer available. See Understanding the "No Longer Available" status for backup jobs.

Backup Care Assistant settings explained — every setting in this window
How to edit the backup care assistant settings
What to do if a Bright Horizons back up care job fails to assign

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