What is the sequence when a session cancels?
Five steps, in order, and the order is the part that matters.
Catch the cancellation while there is still day left to do something with it. Decide which of the two situations you are in, because they run differently. Put the makeup offer in front of the family, or the open hour in front of the technicians who could claim it. Keep the family’s approval in front of anything that touches their calendar. Count the hour only when the session is delivered.
That is all of it. It runs on a whiteboard, a phone, and one person willing to make calls, and the free playbook covers the same ground with no software attached. If you want the short version of the argument rather than the steps, it is on the ABA cancellation recovery page.
What software removes is the calling. Every step above still happens, it just stops depending on whether a coordinator had the time and the phone numbers on the one afternoon it mattered.
How early does a cancellation have to be caught?
Early enough that the hour still has somewhere to go.
A cancellation that surfaces the night before is a problem with options. The same cancellation discovered when the technician is already in the driveway is a loss with paperwork attached.
So the first step is not recovery, it is detection: a confirmation the day before, an easy way for a caregiver to tell you without making a call they will never make, and somebody whose actual job it is to see it come in.
This is the step that often gets done halfway. The reminder goes out. Nobody is watching for the reply.
Is this a family cancellation or a staff callout?
Two different problems, two different runs, and sorting them is step two for a reason.
A family cancellation means the child is not available. There is no slot to fill and nobody is placed into it. What you are building is a makeup offer for that family, at a time they can realistically keep, and they either approve it or they do not.
A staff callout runs the other direction. The child is available and the plan still calls for the hour, so the hour is the thing being protected. It posts as an open hour that a qualified technician may choose to claim.
Making that call on the whiteboard before anyone picks up a phone is what keeps the next three steps from running in the wrong direction. Calls get wasted when a family cancellation is run as though it were a staffing hole.
How does an open hour reach the people who could take it?
Not by group text.
A blast to everyone hands the decision to whoever happens to look at their phone first, and it puts a coordinator in the middle of every reply. Then the coordinator is the one reconciling who answered first, on top of everything else that afternoon.
Put the open hour where the people who could take it will see it, and let them claim it by choice. Nothing is auto-assigned and nobody is placed into a shift. On a whiteboard that is a board in the staff room and a rule everyone knows: first name written takes it.
In Infinite Suite OS the claim works the same way, and the booking is checked against the authorization cap and the daily unit limits before it holds. That check is about approved time, not about people. There is no credential screening on this path and it would be dishonest to imply one: credential checking belongs to a separate billing claims gate, and the two should never be described as if they were one.
When does the hour count as recovered?
At delivery, inside the same authorization period. Not at the booking.
A claimed open hour is a promise. An approved makeup is a promise. Promises cancel too, sometimes for the reason the first session cancelled.
Before delivery there is one gate that does not move: the family’s yes. No recovered hour reaches a family calendar without their approval, and in Infinite Suite OS that is enforced by the engine rather than left to whoever happens to be running the schedule that day.
Then the session is delivered, or it is not. If it is, you have a recovered hour and a number you can defend in a room full of people asking. If it is not, you are back at step one with less of the period left. What share of hours your clinic gets back is your own number: this site publishes a labeled simulation and a calculator you fill in with your own figures, and neither one is a prediction about you.
What happens when nobody has an open hour?
Nothing happens, and that is worth saying out loud rather than burying.
If every technician is booked and no one has a free hour, there is no recovery path to run. No step in this sequence invents a person. That is the ceiling on all of it, and no sequence and no software gets around it.
What the sequence does is make sure the openings that already exist find the hour that needs them, before the day ends and the hour is gone for good. That is a smaller claim than the word recovery usually invites. It is also the one that survives a real Tuesday.