Can I just publish the table and skip the prose?

You can, and it will answer worse. Six passages are retrieved for a question and the material given to the model is capped, so a table that gets cut at a passage boundary can arrive without its header row. A short paragraph restating the anchor and the unit is the insurance against that, and it costs three sentences.

Should the policy mention statutory cancellation rights?

If any exist where you trade and you already publish wording about them, index that wording as it stands. Distance selling rules in many markets give a cancellation period for some orders, with exceptions that vary by what was sold, and the accurate move is to publish your own advisers' sentence rather than a summary. What the document must not do is read as though your policy is the only rule in play.

We handle most cancellations as a favour rather than by the policy. What do we publish?

Publish the policy, then publish the discretion as discretion. A sentence saying that cases outside the policy are looked at individually and who to contact is genuinely useful material, and it is far better than a policy nobody follows, which trains the assistant to state a rule your team then contradicts.

Source material

The cancellation document, and the clock its passages leave behind

Almost every sentence in a cancellation policy is measured from something: the start of the appointment, the date of the booking, the moment the order was placed. The measurement is usually stated once, at the top, and then assumed for the rest of the page. A passage from the middle of that page carries the number and not the thing it counts from, which is how a charge ends up attached to the wrong event.

Why this one is harder than it looks

Notice periods are relative and passages are not. A line reading that cancellations made with less than the published notice attract a charge is only meaningful next to a statement of what the notice is measured against. Businesses almost never repeat that anchor, because within a document read top to bottom it would be tedious. Read one passage at a time, its absence is the whole problem.

The second difficulty is that a sliding scale is nearly always a table, and a table is the most fragile structure in this whole category. Tables in web pages and in spreadsheets are converted into Markdown tables, which works well when the table is a plain grid with one header row. A scale whose meaning depends on a merged header, a colour, or a footnote marker loses that meaning entirely, and what is left is a set of numbers with no labels attached to them.

Third, cancelling and rescheduling are different outcomes with different consequences, and most policies treat rescheduling as a sub-clause of cancelling. Customers do not. Somebody who wants to move an appointment is asking a different question with a different answer, and if the only heading on the page is Cancellations then their question matches a passage about charges they may not owe.

Fourth, a cancellation policy conflates two situations that share a word. There is the customer cancelling, and there is you cancelling: a closure, a staff shortage, a supplier failure. The second is the one that generates the angriest messages and the one that is almost never written down. Separately, where you trade, orders placed at a distance may carry a statutory cancellation right that exists independently of your own policy and applies to some goods and services and not others, so your own terms are not the whole picture and the document should not imply that they are.

What it has to contain

Structure rather than wording. A passage pulled out of this document has to stand on its own, because that is the only form in which it will ever be read.

Structural requirements
Every notice period written with its own anchor	Not the notice period alone but the notice period and the event: measured from the start time of the appointment, or from the date of the stay, or from when the order was placed. Repeated in every sentence that states one, however repetitive that looks on the page.
The sliding scale as a flat table with a real header row	One header row, first, with a word in every cell. No merged cells, no colour carrying meaning, no footnote markers doing work the text does not do. Each row should read as a complete statement when set beside the header: this much notice, this much charge.
A rescheduling section that is not inside the cancellation section	Its own heading, its own notice period, and an explicit statement of whether moving a booking counts as cancelling it. That last sentence is the one people are actually looking for and it is missing from most policies.
A deposit outcome stated in every branch	What happens to the deposit if the customer cancels inside the notice period, outside it, if they reschedule, if they do not arrive, and if you cancel. Five short statements. A deposit paragraph that describes only the good case leaves the assistant nothing to say about the bad one.
A section for cancellations you make	What you do, what the customer gets, and how quickly. Written in the same document rather than left to a decision somebody makes on the day, because on the day nobody will look it up and the assistant has nothing to quote.

The rewrite, in order

Rewrite every notice period so the passage carries its own clock

Go through the document and find each number of hours or days. For every one, ask what it is counted from, then write that into the same sentence. You will end up saying the same phrase five or six times across the page. That is correct and it is the point.

This is the single highest value change in the document and it takes about twenty minutes. A charge with no anchor is not a smaller version of the right answer, it is a different answer, because a customer who assumes the clock starts when they booked rather than when the appointment begins will reach a completely different conclusion about what they owe.

Flatten the scale until it survives conversion

Take the sliding scale and rebuild it as a plain grid. First row is the header. One column for the notice given, one for the outcome, one for what happens to any deposit. No merged cells anywhere, including the ones that only merge for tidiness in the top left corner.

Then write one sentence underneath the table restating the anchor and the currency or unit the outcome column is in. The table may be retrieved without the sentence and the sentence may be retrieved without the table, so each has to be able to do some useful work alone. That redundancy is cheap and it is what stops a passage of bare numbers being useless.

If the scale has fewer than about four steps, consider abandoning the table entirely and writing each step as its own sentence under its own short heading. Prose is more robust than a grid, and a four row table is not buying much layout value in the first place.

Split rescheduling out and let it be found on its own

Give it a heading with the words people use: changing your booking, moving your appointment, rearranging. Under it, state the notice required, whether there is a limit on how many times, what happens to the deposit, and the sentence that matters most, which is whether a reschedule is treated as a cancellation for the purposes of the charge.

Doing this also improves the cancellation section, because everything in it can now be about cancelling. Sections that try to cover two outcomes hedge every sentence, and hedged sentences are exactly the ones that produce an answer nobody can act on.

State the deposit outcome in every branch, including the awkward ones

Deposits are where cancellation policies go quiet, because the honest answer is sometimes unpopular. A document that only describes the refundable case will be retrieved for the non-refundable case, and what comes back is a passage that sounds like a promise.

Write all five outcomes, plainly, in short sentences under the deposit heading. If a deposit is non-refundable after a point, say so in the same sentence as the point. If it is transferable to a new date but not returnable, say that too, because it is a genuinely useful thing to know and it is almost never published.

Do the same for anything you hold rather than take: a card held against a no-show is not a deposit, and a document that uses one word for both will produce answers about the wrong one.

What happens if you skip it

The charge quoted without the clock it is measured from

The message says that cancelling inside the notice period attracts the published charge. It is a true sentence from your own document, cited to the passage it came from. What it does not say is what the notice period runs to, so the customer applies it to whichever event seems natural, which is usually when they made the booking rather than when the booking happens.

The cost lands at the counter, where somebody has to explain that the charge applies and the customer has an answer in their phone saying otherwise. The staff member is right, the customer is not unreasonable, and the document caused it by stating the anchor once and never again.

Check it against this

Before you index it

Every notice period names the event it is measured from, in the same sentence
The sliding scale is a plain grid with one header row and no merged cells
A sentence beside the table restates the anchor and the unit
Rescheduling has its own heading and says whether it counts as a cancellation
The deposit outcome is written for all five branches, including no-show
Cancellations you make have their own section
Nothing on the page implies your terms are the only rights that exist

Questions

Can I just publish the table and skip the prose?: You can, and it will answer worse. Six passages are retrieved for a question and the material given to the model is capped, so a table that gets cut at a passage boundary can arrive without its header row. A short paragraph restating the anchor and the unit is the insurance against that, and it costs three sentences.
Should the policy mention statutory cancellation rights?: If any exist where you trade and you already publish wording about them, index that wording as it stands. Distance selling rules in many markets give a cancellation period for some orders, with exceptions that vary by what was sold, and the accurate move is to publish your own advisers' sentence rather than a summary. What the document must not do is read as though your policy is the only rule in play.
We handle most cancellations as a favour rather than by the policy. What do we publish?: Publish the policy, then publish the discretion as discretion. A sentence saying that cases outside the policy are looked at individually and who to contact is genuinely useful material, and it is far better than a policy nobody follows, which trains the assistant to state a rule your team then contradicts.

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