Start from what the hour is
A cancelled session is not a gap in the calendar. It is an hour a child was authorized to receive and did not, and for a while it can still be delivered. To recover cancelled ABA sessions, the clinic has to treat the hour that way from the moment the cancellation arrives: as something that still belongs to the child, with a window in which it can be made good.
That framing decides everything downstream. A gap gets filled. An hour gets offered, chosen and approved, and then delivered or honestly written off. The first framing is how families come to distrust a schedule. The second is the sequence below.
Step one: act while the hour is still real
A family that cancels knows, for a short while, what else they could do this week. A technician whose session cancelled has not yet made other plans. The hour is still a real object to both of them. That window closes on its own, and once it has closed, a makeup is a favour rather than a plan.
So the first step is a concrete offer inside the hour: a specific window, a specific person, one question. Not a message saying the clinic will look into it, which the family reads as closed. The first callback within the hour explains why this one step outweighs everything else, and why it is a workflow problem rather than a manners problem.
Step two: offer the makeup, and name the person
The offer has two parts, and clinics tend to send only one. The window is the obvious part. The person is the part that decides whether the yes holds. A family that agrees to Thursday at four has agreed to Thursday at four with the technician they were told about, and a substitute discovered at the door is not what they consented to.
Say who is coming, or say plainly that someone else may be offered and let the family decide with that known. Cancellation is a consent problem is the longer argument for why the person is part of the agreement.
Step three: a technician chooses the hour
Someone has to deliver the makeup, and the honest source of that someone is usually another cancellation: the technician who is free at four is free because their own four o’clock cancelled. The clinic cannot widen that pool. What it can do is make sure the whole pool sees the opening, rather than the two people the scheduler thinks of first.
Offer the hour with the reason it exists. Let qualified technicians choose it. Do not assign it, because an assigned makeup is worked without being chosen, and why coverage always lands on the same two people is what a year of assigning looks like.
Step four: the family approves, then the hour is delivered
The technician’s choice and the family’s yes are two different decisions and both have to happen. Once they have, the makeup is booked. It is still not recovered. It is a promise, and a promise squeezed into an already full week is exactly the kind of session that cancels.
Count it when it is delivered. Not when it is booked, not when it is confirmed, and not when the family sounded sure. Rescheduled is not recovered is why, and what counts as a recovered ABA session is the counting rule this site holds itself to: delivered, inside the same authorization period, and not before.
Step five: record why the ones that did not come back did not
Some cancelled hours are lost to speed, some to fit, and some to a rule that left them nowhere to land. Only the first kind is fixed by a better process, so the clinic needs to know which kind each loss was. One word per lost hour is enough: speed, fit, or rule. Not every cancelled hour is recoverable is the guide to keeping the three apart honestly.
Without that record, the clinic will blame its process for hours the process could never have saved, and miss the children whose hours are being lost to a rule every single week.
What this looks like on a whiteboard
Every step above works with no software at all. A rule that whoever receives the cancellation can offer a makeup. A message template with a window and a name. A list of who is free this afternoon, kept where the whole team can see it. A column in the spreadsheet that says delivered, separate from the one that says booked. A word beside each lost hour.
The step clinics cannot keep by hand is the first one. At noon on a Friday, with the scheduler on another call, the cancellation waits, and the waiting is the loss. If you want to put a rough figure on that loss, the Lost Hours Calculator will do it from clinic-level counts.
Where the software removes a step, exactly
In Infinite Suite OS the family cancels in their own app, and the hour becomes a makeup offer at that moment, with no queue in between. A technician claims it because they chose to. The family approves with one yes, and no recovered hour reaches a family’s calendar without it. The hour counts as recovered only when it is delivered, and an offer nobody claims is recorded as not recovered, with the reason, rather than quietly filled.
The software does not decide whether a makeup is clinically appropriate, does not check credentials or state rules on the recovery path, and does not create a technician who does not have a free hour. If you want to see the five steps run on one of your own weeks, book a walkthrough and bring the cancellations.