How best to take deposits and tabs on your POS system
There are a couple of ways to take deposits upfront or run a tab for someone to pay later on your POS system, please have a read through the options below to select the right one for you.
Using Vouchers
Please note that you will need the PRO module enabled for this. Please see here and here for further information on this.
You can use our vouchers function to "sell" a voucher in order to take a deposit from someone.
Scenario
Someone comes into the restaurant in advance of a wedding and wants to put a deposit down. You can sell them a voucher through the system for the amount of the deposit - they pay via cash/card etc for it, and you can either verbally give them the voucher code to quote when they return, or buy some blank cards online to physically give the customer. If you're going to buy cards to give out, ensure that the cards have a barcode/unique identifier on them, so that they can be scanned into the system and assigned the correct monetary value!
Then, during the wedding, the voucher code can be used over and over with every sale as a method of payment or at the end of the wedding, you can pay off a partial amount of the sale with the voucher, and then take the remaining amount via cash/card etc.
Using Account Customers
If you've not used account customers before, please read this page first. You can use account customers to assign in the POS back office a monetary value to their "account".
You can do this either by:
- Setting a credit limit (good for a tab where someone will pay later)
- This means that you haven't actually taken any money from the customer yet, you're just telling the system that they're allowed to spend up to a set amount - for example £50 without needing to pay you yet. At the point of sale, you assign them to the sale, and press Pay > Account > the system will deduct it from their credit limit. When they hit £50 in total, the system will recognise this and not allow any more to be paid off during this method. When the customer is ready to settle up, you will have to go into the back office and enter in a pre-payment amount to tell the system that the customer has paid you. How you take this money from the customer is up to you. Some people do this via the deposit product button, or by selling a voucher.
- Adding a pre-payment to their account (good for a deposit where someone will pay upfront)
- This means that the customer pays you upfront, and in the POS back office, you add this amount to their account. (How you take this money from the customer is up to you. Some people do this via the deposit product button, or by selling a voucher.)
- At the point of sale, you assign them to the sale, and press Pay > Account > the system will deduct it from their account. When they hit £50 in total, the system will recognise this and not allow any more to be paid off during this method.
Using a deposit product button
This is useful for taking money from a customer for a deposit. You can put it through as a MISC sale, but we recommend creating a product button in the back office as it will be easier to track. Add a product in the normal way from Products > Product List > Add new product, but tick "open price" - this will allow you to enter in the deposit amount on the till on an ad-hoc basis. Otherwise, if you don't want to allow it to be an open price product, you can create variants with different amounts, like £100, £200, etc.
Using a table
This is an easy way to run a tab, and can be used in conjunction with customer accounts. Using this method, you add all the items onto a table on the POS app, and keep it all saved there for a day/week/month etc. You can keep adding items onto it throughout the time period. When it comes time to settling up, you can open the table and pay it off with cash or card.
This is a simple and easy method, but one of the drawbacks to this is that if you're tracking your inventory, then the stock of the items on the table won't be depleted until the table is paid off. In your sales and products reports it will also show all the items as sold on that final sale, rather than showing the items being sold throughout the time period.