Anonymous Donations using Square Reader

[Stanza]

Hi, I am the Secretary of a small charity, and we hold bucket collections in various locations. People do not carry cash as they used to, so we want to use our newly purchased Square Reader to take contactless donations when the donor does not have cash.

I have successfully paired the reader with my mobile phone, created a library of sample donations (£1, £2, £5 etc) and taken a donation (£1) from myself as a named customer. But how do we take contactless donations from passers-by without having to create a new customer identity for each donor?

The only way I can think of is to create a fictitious customer called "Anonymous Donor" and use this identity for all the donations. This will mean a multitude of different bank cards being used, so will this trigger an alarm somewhere in the system?

Or is there another way? How do other charities or non-profit organisations deal with this?

[Sam_400º · Accepted solution]

Hey @Stanza - you don’t need to add a customer to a sale at all. In fact you can even turn off the ability to add customer data and the customer directory (useful if you don’t want to have this information to simplify GDPR and data controller rules). 

Within the app you should just be able to enter an amount and then charge - with no other info. 

Hope this helps - but if this isn’t how it’s working for you then @ me and I’ll try my best to help 👍

[Stanza]

Thank you, Sam!

It seems obvious now that I could just ignore the "Add Customer" instruction, but for some reason I felt compelled to obey the instruction!

I'll know where to come for advice in future!

Best wishes.

[doc_choc]

You can also now take contactless payments on your phone without having the square reader, where you can just tap your phone instead. Handy if you can’t charge your reader or any reason.