As a Master Venue Admin you now have the option to switch on instant pay at your venue. This will allow clients to pay instantly at the time of confirming (or self-service clients when creating) their booking through their login. Clients will either be able to pay for their whole booking in full OR will opt to Pay As You Go, and will be billed for the current calendar month’s bookings only. You will then need to ensure that future month’s bookings are billed accordingly.
To activate this option, you need a payment gateway set up to accept payments via Stripe. We have designed Instant Pay to work seamlessly with Stripe because payments are immediate, and we want to help limit any debtors.
If you don’t have a Stripe gateway, this can be easily set up from the Manage tab – Click Edit Venue Button – Click Payment Gateways subtab– Add Payment Gateway button – ‘Click here to link to your Stripe Account’ button. Then just follow the steps on Stripe’s page. Once completed it will take you back to BookingsPlus with the Stripe Gateway showing.
Once you have a stripe account, you can set up the Instant payment in the Manage tab – Edit Venue button – Billing sub-tab.
You will see a New option for Instant payment. Select the tick box and click the Save button on the top right hand-side of the page.
Please note; if you decided for whatever reason you no longer need or want a Stripe Gateway, this will automatically switch off Instant Pay for all clients.
At this point please contact us at the BookingsPlus Helpdesk on helpdesk@bookingsplus.co.uk to let us know your venue has Instant Pay set up, as we will need to tweak the setting for how long you would like to allow your clients to have to process their tentative bookings. Take a look at our Client Articles linked at the bottom of this page to see how this works, and to decide how long you would like this to be. We would recommend around 1 hour.
All clients at your venue will now be set up to make instant payment. If you would like to exclude certain clients you can do so from the Clients tab and click Edit for a client. At the bottom of the page you will now see a new option to exclude that client from having to make payment immediately when confirming provisional bookings or when making any new bookings. If this option is ticked, then the client can still be billed through the automated invoice run (as long as you haven't excluded them from that) or can be billed manually.
If you would like the Venue Contact email to get email notifications once a client has processed a booking, you will need to ensure this setting is set up. To check this go to Manage – Emails – and in the top ‘Receive email when’ section tick ‘Bookings was confirmed by hirers’ and click Save.
The email will be sent to the Contact email saved within your Venue's Basic Information tab:
Your venue is now ready to accept Instant payments. Take a look at our other Instant Pay Articles to see the changes this displays to you as the administrator:
Instant Pay Feature: Booking changes for Administrators
Instant Pay Feature: Invoice changes for Administrators
Instant Pay Feature: Report changes for Administrators
Or how it will now display to the Client:
Instant Pay Feature: Client account process for Confirming a Provisional booking
Instant Pay Feature: Client account process for Creating a Tentative booking
Note – if you are unsure if you have self-service clients set up, or would like to get more information on how to allow clients to self-book, please contact our customer service team on 01604 677764 and they will more than happy to talk you through this.
