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How long is what you already charged still good for

You'll learn how to calculate when a package expires based on your clients' real appointment pace, and what to do if a client doesn't use it in time.

By Yodai · Published on September 6, 2026 · Updated on October 12, 2026

If you sell session packages, you need to decide how long they're good for before a customer like this one asks you, with the money already in hand. A customer bought an eight-session physical therapy package fourteen months ago. They used five, then disappeared. Now they're back, asking for the three sessions they have left, at the price they paid back then, which isn't what you charge now.

Are they entitled to it? If you never wrote down an expiration date, yes: nobody told them otherwise, and you have nothing to show them that says differently. And even if you had set a date, if this is an individual consumer, you can't simply keep what they paid for those three sessions: consumer protection law treats charging someone for services they never used as unfair. The expiration date serves a different purpose: it keeps the balance from staying open forever.

This doesn't just happen with physical therapy. It happens with classes, coaching sessions, any multi-session package you get paid for upfront and deliver bit by bit. The longer the package is meant to last, the more likely someone is to leave it half used and come back once you've forgotten the price you charged.

A package with no expiration date is a loan with no due date

When you sell a package, you're getting paid for a service you haven't delivered yet. That money is already in your account, but the debt stays open until the client uses up the sessions. Without an expiration date, that debt never goes away.

That ties your hands two ways. First: if you raise your prices next year, anyone with an old package can still claim sessions at the old price, with no limit on how long they can wait to do it. Second: you never really know how much you owe your clients as a group, because part of that debt has been sitting dormant for months, maybe years, and it doesn't show up anywhere until someone comes to collect.

The expiration date isn't there to pressure the client. It's there so that package goes from "open forever" to "open until this date," so you can close the books and know, at any point, exactly what you've actually sold and what you haven't.

The date comes from a simple calculation, not a gut feeling or copying whatever timeframe another business uses. Multiply the number of sessions in the package by how often that type of client typically comes back, then add half again on top for vacations, trips, or slow weeks.

An eight-session personal training package, with weekly visits, gets used up in two months if everything goes as planned. With the buffer, a reasonable expiration date is three months out: not one month, which leaves no room for anything unexpected, and not a year, which isn't really a deadline, it's not setting one at all.

That same math, applied to a four-massage package with one visit a month, comes out to four months of normal use and six with the buffer. These are different businesses, so the date for each one is different too: there's no "six months for everything" that works equally well for both. The question you need to ask isn't "what sounds reasonable," it's "how often does someone come back for this service."

What to write, and what to do if it's not used in time

With the date in place and a policy set for when a package doesn't get used in time, you no longer depend on anyone's memory or good faith. Every package you sell now has a clear start and end, just like you already decided what to charge for it.

What's missing to make this work day to day is keeping track properly: knowing at any moment how many sessions each client has left by checking one place, without flipping through a notebook or asking them.

With the expiration date in place, you still need the other thing clients ask you every day: how many sessions each one has left right now, without counting on your fingers.