Two words that get used as one
When a session cancels and the scheduler finds a new time, most clinics record it as handled. The line on the calendar moves, the family is told, and the cancellation stops looking like a problem. In the weekly numbers it shows up as a recovered hour.
It is not one yet. It is a rescheduled hour. The child has not received the session, the technician has not delivered it, and nothing has been billed. What exists is an agreement about the future, and agreements about the future in ABA have a specific failure mode: they are made in the same conditions that produced the original cancellation.
Why the promise breaks so often
A makeup session has to fit somewhere. In a full schedule it fits into whatever was left: an early morning, a Friday afternoon, a slot after the child’s regular session ends. Those are the hours families find hardest to keep. The makeup is being asked to succeed in exactly the conditions where sessions fail.
It is also usually a second commitment stacked on the first. The family agreed to Tuesday, Tuesday broke, and now they have agreed to Thursday as well. If Thursday breaks, the clinic has lost the same hour twice, and if the reschedule was already counted as a recovery, the second loss is invisible. The report said the hour came back. It did not.
What counting the promise does to a clinic
The damage is not in the report itself. It is in what the report teaches leadership to believe.
A clinic that counts reschedules as recoveries sees a high recovery rate and concludes its process works. It stops looking at what happens after the reschedule. It does not notice that makeups are cancelling at a higher rate than regular sessions, because the makeup was closed as a success the moment it was booked. It does not notice which families are being rescheduled repeatedly without ever receiving the hour. And at the end of the authorization period it is surprised by how many units went unused, because the only number it was watching said the hours had been recovered.
The makeup session funnel is the honest shape: identified, offered, accepted, scheduled, delivered. A reschedule is the fourth stage. Only the fifth is a recovery.
Why the authorization period is part of the definition
There is a second reason a reschedule is not a recovery, and it is a clock. Authorized units usually belong to a period. A makeup that lands after the period closes is not making up anything; the unit it was meant to recover has generally expired with the period, and the session, if it happens at all, is spending a different unit from a different pool. What the letter says governs, so check yours, but the principle holds: a recovered hour has to be delivered inside the same period as the hour it replaces.
That is why the counting rule this site uses is narrow on purpose. The full version, with the reasoning, is on what counts as a recovered ABA session. The short version: an hour is recovered when it is delivered, inside the period, and not before.
What to do with the number you already have
You do not have to throw away your reschedule count. It is a real stage and it is worth tracking. What you need is the number beside it: of the sessions you rescheduled, how many were delivered?
That gap is the most useful figure a clinic can produce about its own recovery process, and it costs nothing to compute from records you already keep. If it is small, your reschedules are real and your process is working. If it is large, your process is generating promises, not care, and the fix is somewhere in how makeups are placed and confirmed rather than in how they are counted.
If you want a rough sense of what the undelivered hours are worth, the Lost Hours Calculator will give you one from clinic-level counts alone.
The honest sentence about the software
Infinite Suite OS counts an hour as recovered only when it is delivered. A makeup the family approved and a technician claimed shows as booked until the session happens, and a booked makeup that cancels is a second cancellation, not a recovery that was undone. That is the whole of what the software does about this: it refuses to count the promise.
It does not make the promise more likely to hold. Whether the makeup happens still depends on the family, the technician and the week. If you want to see the board with the two states side by side, book a walkthrough and bring a month where your reschedule count looked better than your utilization did.