Restaurant booking deposits. Fewer empty seats.

Deposit or card on file: two ways to cover no-shows

An empty chair or an unused table is time you can't sell twice. Gaplessly gives you two ways to protect it, and you use one at a time. A deposit charges the client when they book. Card on file saves their card with no charge, so a fee can be charged later if they don't turn up.

Either way, you connect your Stripe account first and set the policy in your booking settings. Whether you can switch it on depends on your plan and that payment setup. With both off, Gaplessly still runs your bookings and you keep taking payment the way you do now.

Setting a booking deposit amount

The simplest deposit is a fixed amount. Restaurants and venues can charge it per person and only from a minimum party size, so a table of two books freely and a group of eight pays upfront.

Salons, clinics and spas can take a percentage of the services booked instead, up to 100% if you want the full price at booking. A restaurant reservation has no priced service total, so percentage deposits don't apply to it.

No-show fees and cancellation fees on a saved card

With card on file, your booking page saves the client's card and tells them straight: the card is saved, not charged now, and if they miss the visit or cancel late, a fee of the amount you set may be charged. That amount is fixed at the moment they book.

Nothing is charged automatically. When someone doesn't show, or cancels too late, an admin charges the fee from the booking, and can lower it first. Optional tiered fees let a late cancellation cost less than a no-show.

A saved card is a promise, and no money has changed hands yet. The fee only lands if the charge goes through, which is the trade-off against a deposit taken at booking.

How your cancellation policy handles deposit refunds

Every deposit policy has a refund window, 24 hours unless you change it. A client who cancels earlier than that gets the deposit back through Stripe automatically. Inside the window, you keep it. Set the window to zero and nothing is refunded on its own, though staff can still refund by hand. Clients see the rule on the payment step, before they pay.

Other rules, like arriving ten minutes early or no pets, go in your house rules. Clients tick a box agreeing to them when they book.

For anything outside the policy, the payments ledger lets an admin refund all or part of a deposit or a charged fee, up to the amount still refundable.

Close-out payments, receipts and the Stripe takings report

A venue's money through Gaplessly is the booking itself: a deposit, a no-show fee or a ticket. Itemised food and drink sales stay on your own POS. For a salon, clinic or spa, when a visit ends, record how the rest was paid: cash, your own card machine, bank transfer or something else. Set your usual method once and staff change it on the booking when a client pays differently. Recording a payment taken on your own terminal doesn't run another Stripe charge.

Receipts carry your trading name and your own footer. Add your ABN and, if you are registered for GST, each receipt becomes a tax invoice with the GST shown. You decide whether deposit receipts are emailed automatically.

The takings report covers money collected through Stripe for any date range you pick: gross, refunded, net and the GST included, with a CSV download. Cash, bank transfers and payments on your own machine recorded at close-out aren't in its totals, so read it as your online collections. It isn't a full till or point-of-sale report.