How bookings become WooCommerce orders

Every paid booking in Tempo is a real WooCommerce order. That's not plumbing trivia; it's why refunds, payment records and your accountant's export all behave like a normal online shop. This article is the reference for how the two systems talk.

What an order looks like

One checkout produces one order, which can contain several bookings (a parent paying for three children at once). Each order line is named after the class, and carries visible Student, Package, Sessions and Included dates rows, so an order makes sense on the admin order screen and in the order emails without opening Tempo at all. Even £0 bookings (complimentary or fully credit-paid) get an order, so every booking has the same paper trail.

What each order status means

Skipping Processing for paid bookings

WooCommerce only marks an order Completed by itself when everything in it is a virtual download, so a paid booking order normally parks at Processing even though there's nothing left to fulfil. If that dangling status bothers your bookkeeping, switch on Tempo → Settings → Booking & checkout → Complete paid orders automatically (off by default): a successful gateway payment then lands the order straight on Completed, and the family receives WooCommerce's "Completed order" email instead of the "Processing" one.

It's deliberately narrow. Only orders made entirely of booking lines qualify, and only when a payment gateway confirms the payment, so statuses staff choose by hand (manual bookings, hand-edited orders) are never overridden. And the safety net below still wins: a payment that lands after the hold expired parks the order On hold with no booking, setting or no setting.

The safety net: payment landing after the hold expired

Occasionally a member completes payment after their 30-minute hold has lapsed (classically, sitting in a payment provider's popup). Tempo re-checks availability at the moment of confirmation, the one gate every payment route passes through:

• Places still free: the paid booking is honoured and created normally.
• A place was taken in the meantime: no booking is created, because the family who took the place fairly keeps it; capacity is never exceeded. The order is parked On hold with a note naming the lost dates. In wp-admin the order shows a prominent "Tempo booking NOT completed" alert; the member sees a calm note that the club will be in touch, and nothing is needed from them.
• Your options as staff: arrange an alternative or a refund; or, if a place frees up, set the order back to Processing and the booking completes normally.

This is rare, but when it happens you'll want to move quickly; the order alert and the Bookings hub filters make these easy to spot.

Housekeeping you never need to do

A background task tidies expired holds every few minutes, but capacity never depends on it: an expired hold stops counting the second it lapses. A slow server cron can't oversell a class or block a sale.