Our winery rents out a building for private events and currently we charge multiple deposits for each private event that vary depending on specific details. I attempted to utilize the “Gift Card” product type to charge the deposits and apply a credit at a later date when the total bill is processed. However, the POS only allows for one gift card use per transaction. This means that I have to manually create and/or adjust gift cards for every private event we host.
Does anyone have suggestions on how to handle this in a more automated manner?
Do you do a lot of event billing in POS, or is it mostly on Admin Panel? If it’s on Admin, you could potentially use the Credits feature (you can create SKUs to sell that add the credit to an account), and each transaction deducts from the total balance of credits regardless of how many individual credits have been added.
It does have some pitfalls though - it’s only available on Admin, and the balance can be adjusted by anyone with access to Contacts. However, if those aren’t deal breakers for you, it might be worth looking at.
Thanks for the responses. The main reason we attempted to use gift cards was to create an automated way to provide a credit on the final bill that can be tracked easily in the system. Gift cards associate themselves with the original order number automatically.
We would rather not use the refund tool because it is clunky and not as easily tracked in the system for deposit purposes. One of the deposits we charge is a Minimum Wine Deposit. So after the event we ring up the wine consumed at the event and need to apply a credit to deduct what the customer has already paid for with the deposit. That would be easy enough to utilize if it weren’t for the fact that we also typically need to apply a credit to the bill for a security deposit.
I would simply set it all up as one gift card. However, the amounts vary so much based on the way the owners want to charge them that there is no way to narrow the options down enough to properly utilize one gift card.
I will look into the the credit feature mentioned by Laceys. We do usually charge these via the POS though.
I know we are probably over-complicating the issue with the way we charge these, but this is the way the owners insist on doing event charges.
