Money & payments

Deposits, online payment, surcharges, refunds, and where the money actually goes.

Every money screen in BookMyVenue is Owner and Manager only. A Staff or Read-only user sees the operational screen without the takings on it. That restriction is enforced on the server, not just hidden in the interface.

Where the money goes

• You do your own KYC with Stripe, on Stripe's own hosted onboarding page. BookMyVenue never sees or stores your bank details or ID documents.
• The statement descriptor is your venue's name. A guest reading their bank statement sees the name of the business they bought from. This is not cosmetic — an unfamiliar descriptor is the single largest avoidable cause of chargebacks.

Connecting Stripe

Find the Stripe connection in Settings. You will be sent to Stripe's hosted onboarding, which asks for your business details, identity documents and a bank account, and then returns you to BookMyVenue.

Until Stripe onboarding is complete, you cannot take live payments. A partially onboarded account is the usual reason "the payment page will not load" — check the Stripe connection status first.

Deposits

A deposit is what stops a no-show costing you the whole slot.

Set a deposit on a service (appointments) as either a fixed amount or a percentage of the price. From then on, a guest booking that service is asked to pay before the booking is held.

How a deposit booking behaves

1. The guest picks a time. The booking is created as pending and the time is held while they are typing their card in — so nobody takes the slot out from under them.
2. If they pay, the booking becomes confirmed.
3. If they abandon the payment sheet, the hold expires and the time is released.

That third point matters. Without it, an abandoned card form would hold a slot all night and you would silently lose the business.

Deposit states you may see against a booking: requires payment → paid, or failed, cancelled, refunded.

Surcharges

Public holiday surcharge

Set a percentage in Settings → hospitality policy → Public holiday surcharge. It applies automatically on public holidays in the state you set in Settings → Regional — so you set it once and never think about it again.

Disclosure

Surcharges are disclosed to the guest before they pay, on the ordering surface and on the receipt. This is not optional and it is not configurable, because in Australia an undisclosed surcharge is a compliance problem, not a pricing decision.

Refunds

If you reject an order that has been paid for, the money goes back.

This is automatic and it is recorded. The refund is not a manual chore you might forget — it is tied to the rejection, which is why the order rejected message to the guest can honestly say the money is coming back.

Refunds are recorded against the order, so your reports show the net position rather than gross takings you never kept.

Refunding is Owner/Manager only. Individual devices can also be granted or denied refund and void rights separately — see Devices.

What each role can see

A Staff user who opens a money screen does not get a blank page — they get an explicit refusal, so nobody mistakes "no permission" for "no takings today".

Tax invoices

Your ABN (11 digits) and legal / registered business name live in Settings → tax details. They are what appear on a tax invoice from the till.

If they are blank, what the till prints is a receipt, not a valid tax invoice. Fill them in before you trade.

Other things that take money

Next

• Reports — the numbers at end of day and end of month
• Troubleshooting — "the payment did not go through"

Still stuck? Email [email protected] with your venue name, what you were doing and what happened instead. Please don't send passwords — we will never ask for one.