Process Card Payment With No Sale

[DavidN]

I sometime have regular customers forget their wallets, phones, etc, so I would process the sale in my previous POS (not linked to EFT) and then they'd come back with their card and I'd enter it into my Westpac terminal. I have Square for Restaurants and Square Readers at present, trying to figure out how I manually enter an amount for EFT without processing a sale

[Seamus]

Hey @DavidN,

Thanks for reaching out.

I'm not too sure if this can be done - because Square integrates POS and card payments, each time you enter any form of payment (card, cash, "other") it will be recorded as a sale.

How are you originally recording the transaction when they come in? Are you not taking a payment or recording a sale, or are you entering the transaction as a non card payment?

[DavidN]

Hey @Seamus, prior to Square, I was using Kounta, not linked to any EFT, so I was manually keying in card payments on my Westpac EFT devices for all sales. I haven't yet had this happen since migrating to Square

I guess in the short term, I could process the order up to payment, print a bill, then void the sale for re-keying when the customer comes in again. It's not a frequent occurrence, but it does happen from time to time

[Seamus]

@DavidN I'm not sure you'll be able to print a bill unfortunately - Square's POS prints a receipt after the transaction has been made.

One of the benefits of having an integrated POS and payment processor is that it tracks everything in the one place as it happens. The flip side is if you're accustomed to separating the two and processing a sale but not actually taking payment at the time of recording it, there's no real way to do that via Square's POS.

Your best workaround is probably going to be Square Invoices - this actually isn't too dissimilar than printing a physical bill. Invoices will allow you to email an invoice to a customer saying "You own $x for x goods/services", and have the seller pay later while tracking this flow. An invoice can be paid remotely by the customer via a payment link, or it can be paid in store with the card reader in the Point of Sale app. In the interest of transparency, if the customer was to pay via the payment link in the invoice, you'd incur a 2.2% fee rather than the 1.9% fee on a transaction with a physical card being read.

Hope this helps!