The loss the clinic learns about last
A cancellation, however late, arrives as information. Someone at the clinic knows the hour is gone, and from that moment there is a chance to do something about it.
A no-show arrives as a technician standing at a door. They knock, they wait, they text, and eventually they call the office. By the time the clinic knows the session did not happen, the technician has spent the drive and part of the hour, the family may not know anyone came, and the window in which a makeup could still be placed that day is already partly gone.
That is why ABA session no-show recovery is a distinct problem from cancellation recovery, even though the path afterwards is the same. Everything the clinic would do with a cancellation, it now has to do later, with less information, and with a technician who is out of pocket standing on a porch.
What to do in the first fifteen minutes
The technician needs one instruction, agreed in advance, so that nobody is improvising on a doorstep. How long to wait. Who to tell. Whether to leave a message for the family and what it should say. Whether the rest of their day changes.
The office needs one action: record the no-show as a lost hour immediately, not at the end of the day, because the recovery clock is already running. Then reach the family, not to scold, but to find out what happened and to offer the hour back. A no-show is often a moved session nobody wrote down, a family that never received the schedule, or a child who was taken to urgent care at eight in the morning. The message that lands is the one that assumes the family had a reason.
Then it is a makeup, like any other
Once the clinic knows the hour was missed, it is a cancelled hour with less time on the clock. The missed session still belongs to the child’s authorization until the period or the daily limit says otherwise, so a concrete makeup window offered that afternoon can still recover it. The same three things have to happen: a technician chooses the hour, the family approves the hour and the person, and the session is delivered. How to recover cancelled ABA sessions is the full sequence, and every step of it applies.
What does not survive the no-show is the leisurely version. A no-show recorded at month end is unrecoverable by the time anyone reads it, because the period has moved on and the makeup window closed weeks earlier. Rescheduled is not recovered matters here too: a no-show that is rebooked and then missed again has been lost twice, and the second loss is invisible if the first rebooking was counted as a recovery.
The technician’s hour
A no-show costs the technician more than a cancellation does. They drove. They arrived. They waited, and they were probably not paid for any of it. Whether a clinic pays for a no-show is a wage and policy decision to be made with qualified advice in its own jurisdiction, and this page does not make it. What this page can say is that a clinic with no policy has already decided, and the technician noticed. The RBT paycheck problem is what that decision looks like over a year.
Repeated no-shows are a schedule problem
One no-show is an event. Three in a month from the same family is information: the standing session no longer fits their week, and they are not saying so. The useful response is not a fee and not a warning. It is a conversation that rebuilds the schedule with the family, because a session that fits does not get missed, and a fee changes when families cancel far more than whether they show up.
What a cancellation window policy should say covers how to write the expectation down so it is clear before the first missed session, and what happens to a cancelled ABA session follows the hour itself, including what becomes of the authorized units.
Counting no-shows honestly
Record the no-show as its own kind of loss, separate from cancellations, because the two have different fixes. Cancellations are recovered by speed. No-shows are prevented by schedules that fit and recovered by the office acting the same day. A clinic that lumps them together will see one number rise and not know which fix to reach for.
If you want a rough figure for what the missed hours are worth, the Lost Hours Calculator will produce one from clinic-level counts, and no-shows belong in that count.
What the software does, and the honest limit
In Infinite Suite OS the recovery path opens on a cancellation. A no-show is not a cancellation until someone at the clinic records it as one, and the software does not detect a missed session by itself; a technician at a door is still a person telling the office what happened. Once the hour is recorded, the four steps run as they do for any cancelled session: the hour becomes a makeup offer, a technician chooses whether to claim it, the family approves with one yes, and it counts as recovered only when delivered. If you want to see a missed hour run through it, book a walkthrough.