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Feature Request: Bar Tab

I run a clubhouse bar and very often someone will put money over the bar. I understand the open ticket options works like a bar tab where drinks are clocked up and someone pays at the end of the night.

 

Is there a way for someone to pay the money up front and drinks are purchased against this amount until it runs out?

 

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Gary

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Gary, We have a club with 20 members and a heap of supporters in Townsville, What we have done is brought 75 gift cards and had them branded in our club colour's and name. We issue a card with their name on it to all members and they charge the card to the value they want so do some of our regulars supporters. when the card drops down to empty the card holder recharges it. and the cards are kept in a folder or on their person.

Now if you have a party or gathering with two or more groups , you can simply get a new gift card and charge it to their value the group wants, i.e $500 and if the second group wants to put @$200 for their own group, same again, this way both barman and group coordinator can keep an eye on the value left, as it comes up on the screen as $$ remainder of ter each transaction and at the end of the night clear the card to use it again.

you could use coloured wrist bands to ID both separate groups.

pete

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Admin

Hey @buf,

 

Thanks for getting in touch.

 

At the moment there's unfortunately no way to take an initial payment then manage that as a tab that will cut off when a limit has been reached.

 

You could work around this by using gift cards or otherwise track outside of Square.

 

Sorry I couldn't be of more help here! We'll use this thread to track the feature request moving forward.

Seamus
Square, Australia
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A gift card is not the solution. When working in a fast pace environment like a bar, to make sure to avoid mistake, you should be able to set a maximum amount on a bar tab, this way once the limit is reach a staff won't be able to add anymore items.

 

It is very common in venue to be asked for this a now that Square is targeting restaurants with Square for Restaurant, you should really consider adding this feature!

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Gary, We have a club with 20 members and a heap of supporters in Townsville, What we have done is brought 75 gift cards and had them branded in our club colour's and name. We issue a card with their name on it to all members and they charge the card to the value they want so do some of our regulars supporters. when the card drops down to empty the card holder recharges it. and the cards are kept in a folder or on their person.

Now if you have a party or gathering with two or more groups , you can simply get a new gift card and charge it to their value the group wants, i.e $500 and if the second group wants to put @$200 for their own group, same again, this way both barman and group coordinator can keep an eye on the value left, as it comes up on the screen as $$ remainder of ter each transaction and at the end of the night clear the card to use it again.

you could use coloured wrist bands to ID both separate groups.

pete

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Admin

Thanks for this workaround @parky, this is a great example of using gift cards for bar tabs!

 

@buf hope this helps provide an alternative!

Seamus
Square, Australia
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Thanks you for your help with this. Still working on this and will look at the cards.

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Hello Parky,

We are a Golf Club in Launceston and I am trying to create customer accounts in Square credited with winnings from playing golf that can be redeemed in the bar, restaurant or proshop.

The only way I can see to do this is through Gift Cards as you have done, The club would purchase the gift card in Square and allocate that card to the member. I have tested this with egift cards and applied the card to the customer but when I select the customer on checkout and use a gift card for payment it asked for the number. I thought the available gift card for that customer would automatically be shown.

Also haven't worked out how to recharge the card or does it have to get to zero before you can do that.

 

Appreciate any insights you can give me.

Cheers,

Peter 

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Square Community Moderator

Hey @mclinden56,

 

Thanks for writing in and welcome to the community 😊

 

eGift Cards work a little differently to the physical gift cards @parky is using in his workaround. Physical gift cards can be used on your point of sale similarly to a bank card, so no gift card numbers would need to be entered. 

 

You would have to enter the eGift Card number, which is included in the email sent out when the gift card is purchased. Electronic gift cards can't be recharged- once the value of the gift card has been used up, you'd have to sell another card. 

 

Please let us know how you go!

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We have a wedding and events business and have 4 Square terminals around the venue.  Quote often we will run Bar tabs for Weddings.  A number of times we have had parents etc come and want to pay a portion of the tab.  Is it possible that we can take a split payment but then keep the ticket running.  At this time it seems to not let you do that.

 

Cheers in advance.

 

Also what is the limit for an open ticket.  Our system appears to crash later in the night when running larger Tabs/tickets?  Is there a way around this?

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Admin

Hey @thewildvine,

 

Thanks for reaching and welcome to the community!

 

At the moment there's unfortunately no way to pay off a partial amount for an open ticket. If you were to start a split payment, all payments need to be made when the payment is being split within about a 5 minute window, or the pending card transaction will time out and void.

 

We have an existing thread tracking Bar Tab features, so I've moved your post here to help us track additional bar tab feature requests in the one place. Partial payments would definitely be a handy feature to have here!

 

You will find that Open Tickets is not particularly suitable for running up very large tabs at the moment. I've seen stability issues occur once you tabs start getting very large (in terms of numbers of items). There is no set number of items or dollar amounts, but the larger the ticket gets the more in-app memory is used, and once the app has exceeded its memory allocation on the iPad it can crash. I've seen this before in large bar tabs that start exceeding $1000.

 

This can usually be solved by rebooting the app or accessing it on another mobile device, but it's obviously not ideal! I believe the Open Tickets feature was designed more with shorter dining session in mind where you're not likely to get 100+ items on a ticket.

 

Sorry I can't be of more help here, but hope this provides some more context.

Seamus
Square, Australia
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Thanks Seamus, the stability issue actually seems to be getting a bit worse in the last few months. Usually we uninstall square reinstall and it is sometimes ok.  Most of our tabs range from $3k to $5k and it is quite sporadic when it crashes.  I'm not sure how to get around it? Our ipads have little or no other apps installed and 2 are less than 18months old.

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Admin

Hey @thewildvine,

 

The issue here isn't related to how many apps you have installed or how old the iPad is, but I believe how much RAM the Square app is able to use within iOS. You will see app stability issues with open tickets of the size you're describing on any iPad, unfortunately the open ticket system wasn't designed for running up bar tabs with as many line entries as it sounds like you're getting up to on those tabs.

 

I wish I had a workaround or a solution, but this is unfortunately a known limitation of Open Tickets. I'd recommend to try and close off open tickets before they reach this point and start new ones - obviously not ideal, but it'll help with the issues you're seeing with large open tickets causing the app to crash.

 

 

Seamus
Square, Australia
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Please please please Square, can you look at adding bar tabs - this is such a common thing in Australia and I'd imagine other countries that run bars must have them.

We have been using a work around with gift cards, but it's really a horrible work around for us for a few reasons:

We commonly have groups that come in and are not sure exactly how much they'll spend and will often want to start with a certain amount and then extend the bar tab several times.   This becomes a real issue if they want to make decisions every couple of hundred dollars.

Under the work around, we'd have to say put $1000 on a bar tab and charge it to their credit card which is fine... Then after a few hours it runs out, and they say, we'll just add another $200 and see how it goes - so then we need to run off, find the boss in a group of 50+ people and ask for their credit card again...... Then that runs out and they want to add more money - off we run to find them (while trying to serve 20 people waiting at the bar for a drink - but we can't until the bar tab is extended).

Our current work around has been using the gift cards, we generally have an agreement with the client for a starting amount and we just preload the card as "cash".   Then as it runs out, we see them quickly and either add more cash to an agreed amount of just keep adding cash normally in $50/$100 increments if they give us the go ahead as it gets close to the end of their booking to just let the bar tab keep going until the end of the event.

After this, we simply add up the "cash" amounts that have been added to the gift card and charge their credit card in one go for the total amount.   

Of course doing it this way then throws the whole point of sale out of whack because we have said we've taken maybe $1500 in cash for a voucher and then we charge their credit card on what we call an "open stock item" for $1500 - meaning our reports show we made $1500 more than we did.  

It's not hard to account for this when reporting income for tax reasons, but it does throw all the square reports out the window when comparing day to day, month to month and year to year.

John McNeill
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We have recently set up our POS system for our small cricket club. Using the open tickets for a tab is there a way we can set a spend limit if someone puts down their credit card, so we do not go over it . 

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Admin

Hey @HCC1925, thanks for your post! I moved it to our Bar Tabs feature request thread - in short it's not available at the moment but you can use some workarounds using Gift Cards.

 

You can check @parky's response for the workaround their club uses, you could also check out eGift cards in place of physical ones.

 

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions 🙂

Seamus
Square, Australia
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We have been asked to cater for a child's birthday party. The parents want to start a tab for $500, which would be topped up if needed. Party guests will be wearing armbands. They have chosen a public park for the event, which means other uninvited people might wish to purchase as well. We have never operated using a bar tab before, what would be the easiest way to keep track of the balance and how do we differentiate between guests and non-guest payments? would it just be simpler to write down manually each amount and deduct from the  $500? Help! I have no idea how to handle this, LOL

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Hey @Topsy294, welcome to the Community 👋

 

I've moved your post to our Bar Tab feature request thread - some Square Sellers have shared workarounds that you may find work for you here! You could honestly go about this either of the ways you'd suggested. 

 

The way I'd probably go about this is to use an eGift card on file within the Point of Sale app. You'd do this by first setting up an eGift card, then entering it as a card on file in a customer directory contact. When making the sale, you'd add the customer contact to the sale, and then you can charge the eGift card on file as a payment method. That way once the gift card has been redeemed, no further purchases can be made.

 

You could also use Open Tickets, you'd just need to keep an eye on how much the customer is spending and be aware not to go over the amount!

 

Either way you go, if you also want to charge customer not using the tab, simply don't use the customer contact/card on file when making the sale, OR make the sale without adding the items to the open ticket you have for the tab. So these would be just like making any other sale! Let us know if you have any questions 🙂

Seamus
Square, Australia
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many thanks. I will have to try to follow the instructions that you have provided.

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also requesting bar tab

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Square Community Moderator

Thanks for adding your vote to this feature request @cughin

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Another vote for the bar tab please - like ASAP!!!! 

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