Taking payment
Cards, cash, payment links and staged payments, and how the money reaches you.
Payments hang off bookings. Open a booking and its payments card shows what is owed, what has been collected, and what is still outstanding.
Setting up card payments
To take money by card you need a payout account connected. Go to Settings and open the Collect payments block, then connect your account.
You are paid directly. Your customers pay you, into your account, not into ours.
Until this is set up you can still record cash and bank transfers, and everything else in Bookables works normally. You just cannot charge a card.
The three ways to collect
From a booking, press Collect payment and choose:
Card payment. Charge their card there and then, with the card details taken on the spot.
Manual payment. Record cash or a bank transfer you have already received. This does not move any money, it records what happened.
Email a payment link. Sends the customer a secure link to pay themselves. Useful for the customer who is not standing in front of you, and for the invoice you want settled before you go back out.
Prepaid and postpaid
Each service says how it can be paid for:
- Prepaid, where the customer pays in full online at the moment they book.
- Postpaid, where they pay you afterwards.
You can allow either, or both, per service. At least one has to be on, or nobody could ever pay you. Quote-priced services can only be postpaid, for the obvious reason that there is no price yet.
Staged payments
Bigger jobs are rarely one payment. Add stage splits a booking into separately payable pieces, each with its own invoice number, its own due date and its own payment link.
A stage can be:
- A percentage of the job, for the classic deposit.
- A fixed amount.
- The remainder, for the balance at the end.
As you build a stage the page shows what it comes to and what is left after it, so you cannot accidentally invoice for more than the job is worth.
Note: Staged payments are a Pro feature. Otherwise a booking carries a single amount.
Statuses and methods
A payment is Due, Paid, Overdue or Refunded, and records how it was taken: cash, card, bank transfer or other.
The Payments page in the main menu is every payment across every booking, so you can see what is outstanding without opening jobs one at a time.
Refunds
Refund a payment from the booking it belongs to. Refunding is deliberately separate from cancelling: calling a job off does not automatically send money back, because sometimes it should not.