Split payment on square for restaurants for guests leaving early

[LeVivant]

Hello 

I need to be able to take partial payments when some guests of a large party must leave early. After taking partial payment I need to resume service of the rest of the restaurant before returning to the accepting final payments of the partially paid bill. 

Unless I'm wrong, Square does not appear to facilitate this. The software development must allow this as it come up from time to time.

If it is the case Square software cannot accept partial payment, then resume servicing restaurant and later allow for remaining guests of partially paid bill to pay when they are ready then ultimately this must be fixed by Square software developers.

There's two theoretic workarounds I am contemplating for this software problem;

1. The easy solution, Take the money via a bank EFTPOS/merchant and bypass use of square for accepting the early departures transaction. Then when there's time.delete the items ordered or items to the value of the equally split bill. (this will cause loss of revenue for Square by reducing revenue that Square processes)

2. The more time consuming solution, Make note of and then delete items ordered by early departure to re-enter all items on a new bill.

Has anyone else.encountered this issue and if so what are your workarounds if additional to the above two solutions?

[Madala]

Hi Levivant.  We do this all the time and it works well.  Instead of clicking PAY BILL and then SPLIT BILL on the payment page, don't click on PAY BILL.  When the early leaver wants to pay, open the table docket and click down the bottom on ACTIONS then click up the top left on SPLIT BILL (I think it's called or it might be SEPARATE ITEMS - I can't remember).  Anyway, it will open all the items on the bill with bullet points beside them.  Click on each item the early leaver wants to pay for and the click CREAT NEW BILL and it will move them all on to a separate bill that the person can pay.  For example if the bill was called TABLE 7, the newly created bill will be called TABLE 7-2.  Make sure you hit SAVE ALL BILLS then go back and find TABLE 7-2 and open that up and click PAY BILL and the customer can pay that.  All the rest of the items on TABLE 7 bill stay on the original bill and the remaining people can stay and pay later.

I know this sounds a bit complicated, but once you get the hang of it, its quite easy.

[LeVivant]

Hi Madala.

Many, many MANY thanks!!!!

Will have a crack at this tomorrow morning.

Cheers.

Le Viv!

[Laurie_]

Thanks for taking the time to jump in to provide this great answer, @Madala! 🙏

For your own reference, @LeVivant, you can find the steps for splitting bills and other actions in our Bill Management Support Article. This is a handy guide to have if you're unsure about what each action does.

[samdon1972]

Hi @lauro and thanks @LeVivant. We tried this and yes it works - but I note some POS software will allow you to click on a PAY button at the time you split the items out for the person who is leaving early (or paying first). That way you don't have to go back to the floor plan and pick the new table.

If you have a table of 6 (for example) and all are paying separate and all are leaving, doing the above instructions where you need to go to the floor plan and pick the newly created table to pay, just adds 15 or 20 seconds to each payment which becomes frustrating.

The PAY button after your split the items out is what we really need.

Any thoughts - do we know if this is on the roadmap?

[lawnbrook]

@samdon1972 ,

Totally agree that the split billing is cumbersome and inflexible. The other issue I have is if someone just wants to pay a $$ amount and leave the bill open, You can't do it unless you split out items to that $$ amount.

May be worth adding your voice to this thread also:

Partial payment for a bill - The Seller Community

Regards,

Bruce