Pre paid drinks or something similar?

[TheTavern]

Hi, 

I’m wondering if someone could help me, or point me in the right direction. We run an events bar, and for lots of our events, customers like to pre pay, or pay after for a set amount of drinks. 

We currently, put it through as other payment types, however this slightly messes our figures up.

When pre ordering these drinks, they pay a flat rate price of £4 per drink. This would be ok, as we could just go into the report, and minus the total in the “other” from our end of day sale.

But i cant see any way to find out the total number of “other” sales, so we know how many drinks to charge for. At the moment we are keeping a manual tally, but it would be much easier to have them go through the till. Has anyone got any advice?

Thanks!

[Breffni]

Hey @TheTavern, thanks for your post. 

I'm trying to think of a solution here or at least a good workaround but I just need a bit more of an insight into your current set-up. 

When your customers pre-pay, how many drinks are they paying for roughly? 

Do you put through specific items or do you just put down a custom charge of £4? 

There more info you can provide here will be really helpful, thanks 🙂 

[TheTavern]

Hiya,

So currently we are putting down the item they purchase for example a rum and coke, so for stock management sake, it will remove one serving of each, then it’s put through as an other sale. And on a piece of paper we tally that we have sold one drink. This obviously allows for errors, so we would love an alternative option! 

For example we have an upcoming event with roughly 600 people that will have drinks pre paid. 

Our main concern is being able to track the number of items that are going through. 

Thanks!

[Breffni]

Thanks @TheTavern. 

There isn't really an easy way about this that I can think of, unfortunately.

You could continue taking the deposits as you are in bulk and then at the event use open tickets to keep track of the drinks for each table. The issue there is you would have to tender the sales off twice and end up refunding large amounts, which isn't ideal or recommended.

I wonder if setting up something like Self-Serve orders with Square Online might work for your business, as an alternative solution? 

It would remove the prepayment option but you could enable open tabs. 

This allows customers to continue ordering items on the same tab throughout their stay. They’ll enter payment information up front but won’t need to check out and pay until the end of their visit.

This would definitely make things easier for you in terms of book-keeping and stock control. 

Let me know what you think!