Prepayments and no-show fees on manual bookings

Bookings you add yourself, from the phone, an email or a walk-in, can ask for money too. This guide shows you how to put a prepayment or a no-show fee on a booking you create in the dashboard, and what happens differently compared to a booking a guest makes online.

Before you start

This needs an active paid plan and the Online payment add-on connected to Stripe. On top of that, the switch you want has to be active: Prepayment for a prepayment, No-show fees for a no-show fee. A switch that is not active does not appear on the booking form at all. See how to enable the online payment add-on, then prepayment setup or no-show fee setup.

Which of the two to ask for

The two are charged differently, so pick the one that matches what you are protecting:

• Prepayment. The guest pays the amount when they follow the link. The money is collected up front.
• No-show fee. The guest’s card is saved and authorized, and nothing is charged unless you later set the booking status to No-show.

Everything else in this guide works the same way for both, apart from what a cancellation does, which is at the end of this guide.

Add the payment to the booking

1. Open any booking view from Menu, for example Calendar, and start a new booking. The form opens with the heading New booking.
2. Fill in the date, time, party size and the guest’s contact details. An email address, a phone number, or both, is what the payment link is sent to.
3. Turn on Require prepayment or Require no-show fee in the payment section of the form.
4. Enter the Amount. On a manual booking you type the amount yourself; it is not taken from the opening hour, so it can be anything you agree with the guest. It has to be above zero: with the switch on and Amount left blank or at 0, the booking saves with no payment on it at all. Nothing warns you and the saved booking looks like any other, so check the amount before you save.
5. Save the booking.

Turning one switch on turns the other off, so a booking carries one payment type and never both. If the payment section is missing entirely, Stripe is not connected yet, or the booking is already closed. If the section is there but the switch you want is missing, the matching add-on (Prepayment or No-show fees) is not active.

Note: The amount you type is the full amount the guest pays. Tax is not added on top, so if you charge VAT, include it in the amount.

How the guest gets the link

The Notifications section of the booking form decides that. Turn on E-mail, or SMS, or both, and the guest is sent the payment link when you save.

The SMS switch is only there when your restaurant has the SMS notifications add-on active and guest SMS notifications switched on in your notification settings. Without it, email is the only automatic route, so a guest with no email address has to be sent the link by hand.

To send it yourself, open the saved booking and use Booking status & payment link on the booking form. That link opens the booking’s own status page, where the guest can complete the payment, and you can paste it into any message you like.

A payment link you create yourself in your Stripe account is not the same thing. It is not attached to the booking, so the booking still shows the payment as outstanding after the guest has paid it, and the money does not appear on the booking or in the prepayments and no-show fees report. Use Booking status & payment link instead.

What is different from an online booking

There is no payment deadline. An online booking that is not paid within your Payment completion time is deleted automatically. A booking you create in the dashboard does not get that deadline: it stays in your calendar with the payment marked as pending until the guest pays, or until you change or delete the booking yourself. Follow up with the guest if the payment does not arrive, since the booking holds its tables in the meantime like any other booking.

You set the amount, not the opening hour. The prepayment and no-show fee amounts configured on your opening hours apply to bookings made through your booking page. On a manual booking you type the amount in.

The cancellation policy comes from the opening hour. If the booking sits inside an opening hour that has a cancellation policy set on its Payment tab, that policy is copied onto the booking. The policy sets how much notice the guest has to give, and what it then does depends on which of the two payments you asked for:

• Prepayment. A guest who cancels with more than that much notice is refunded automatically. A guest who cancels later than that is not refunded, and a note is added to the booking saying so. You can still refund them by hand from the booking.
• No-show fee. There is nothing to refund. A guest who cancels later than the notice period is charged the fee automatically, the same as if they had not turned up. A guest who cancels in good time is not charged.

If the opening hour’s cancellation policy is set to None, nothing is refunded automatically whatever the notice, and you handle it yourself from the booking. The same is true if the opening hour has no payment settings at all: neither of those runs, and you handle it yourself from the booking.

What this article does not cover

Setting up prepayments or no-show fees on your opening hours, so that guests booking online are asked to pay, is the prepayment guide and the no-show fee guide.

Refunds, failed payments and payments that need fixing afterwards are in refunds and payment problems on a booking.

Whether a card can actually be charged is decided by Stripe and the guest’s bank, not by Resos. Payouts, account verification and disputes are handled in your own Stripe account.

If a payment link did not reach a guest, or a manual booking is stuck waiting for payment, write to us at hi@resos.com with the date and the booking and we will check it with you.