Online prepayment: take a deposit when clients book

You can require a payment at the moment a client books online - a deposit, or the whole price. The client pays on the payment provider's own secure page, and the money lands in your account: Tervita never holds it, and the receipt comes from you.

This is the answer to no-shows. A client who has paid something up front turns up far more often than one who has not.

Connect a payment provider first

Open Booking settings in the sidebar and find the Payments section. Nothing charges anyone until a provider is connected here.

Two providers are available:

• Stripe - cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Press Connect Stripe and you are sent to Stripe's own page to authorise the connection. We only ever store the id of your connected account, never your keys.
• Montonio - bank payments across the Baltics and Poland. Paste the Access key and Secret key from your Montonio partner account. The secret is stored encrypted and never shown again. Montonio settles in EUR and PLN only.

Once a provider is connected, the section says so, and prepayments are live from that moment.

Set how much clients pay

Default prepayment % applies to every service that does not set its own. Leave it empty and prepayment is off by default.

• 100 charges the full price of the service at booking.
• 30 takes a 30% deposit and leaves the rest to be paid at the clinic.
• Empty means no prepayment.

To change it for a single service, open Services, edit the service, and use Prepayment % under Online prepayment. There, empty means "use the clinic default" and 0 means "no prepayment for this service" - so you can run a 50% deposit on long treatments and take nothing on a quick consultation.

If you set percents but never connect a provider, the section warns you, and bookings keep running without prepayment rather than failing.

What the client sees

On the booking page the service shows a Prepayment badge with the percent. Before confirming, the client sees what they pay now and what is left to pay on site, then presses Pay & book and is taken to the provider's secure page.

The time slot is held while they pay. When the payment lands, the booking becomes a normal booking and the usual confirmation is sent.

If they abandon the payment or the payment window runs out, the hold expires by itself and the slot is released for someone else. The client sees that the payment was not completed and can book again. You do not have to clean anything up, and staff are not notified about holds that never became bookings.

At the till

When the client arrives, open the appointment and ring it up as usual at Point of Sale. What they already paid online appears as a Paid online amount against the sale, so you only collect the remainder. The same prepayment can never be applied twice.

Good to know

• Prepayment applies to bookings made on your public booking page. Appointments staff create by hand in the calendar are unaffected.
• Refunds are made in your payment provider's own dashboard - the money never passed through Tervita, so it is refunded where it was taken.
• Prepayment works alongside Packages and gift cards; they are different things and can be used together.
• Changing the percent affects new bookings only. Bookings already made keep the terms they were made under.