Catering - Card Processing / Tips

[MeganMitchell]

We have 14 locations, and one of them being fully Catering. Within our Catering location we have recently switched it over to Toast and are now running deposits, final balance payments etc., and we are experiencing major issues with reporting and Capturing Payments.

The process we currently use is as follows: 

• Job is going to be executed on 12/6/22 (Tuesday)
• 12/2/22  - We ring in the deposit for the job ( to ensure we have a portion of the funds)
• 12/5/22 - We will ring in the remaining balance of the job so that when we execute on 12/6/22 we are able to take the guest the receipt to fill out the CC portion. 
  • We have DISABLED: 1. Employee Auto Clock out & 2. Auto Batch
  • Disabling these features would ideally allow us to be able to go in and enter the tip once the job has been completed. 
  • However Toast has a feature that i believe is called "End of Business Day" which will automatically close out shifts at 4am, even though I do not have Auto Clock out enabled, so with that happening the only work around is to go into the employee that I need to enter the tip for on the previous day, remove the shift and then go in and re create the shift and run a shift review. 
• Where we run into the problem is: 
  • If we were to Auto batch at 4am we would only be allowed to go in on the back end and adjust the tip amount MAX $250.00, anything over $250.00 would require us to call toast and have a representative process that for us.  During this time of year we are doing $60,000-$75,000 on at least 10 days and calling toast to process this is not an option for us. 
• Does Toast have the option to provide us with a Card Processing Terminal so that we are able to operate without being forced to close out shifts due to the "end of business day" feature?

[josh212 · Accepted solution]

@MeganMitchell 1st off my apologies for not seeing md helping you before if you haven’t figured this out yet you can achieve your desired solution in two ways. 1st is to use customer invoicing  then require deposit/payment on different days option 2 is using next day mode 

Ok So Your best bet is to do this on the backend from Toast Customer Invoicing and require the payment on that date of the order from the customer. (More than happy to show you how I use it as I just finished a busy season

Now for option 2

That being said that isnt always the easiest. You need to follow these directions exactly or it will not work correclty. 

Go into your back end and Enable orders in Next Day mode. Set this "TIme" to be the latest possible time in the next day to avoid confustin.

Now wehn placing the order first step is to togggle Next day mode on the POS (If you forget to to this its not a big deal as you have til EOD to fix it.)

Start By selecting the Dining Option and then entering required guest information (it is always best to start with an email versus a phone number as right now TOAST uses email addresses as the key customer identifier for guest profile.  Otherwise enter phone number, delivery info, then next screen billing cusomer info if different. (Key if the delivery and billing customers are the same make sure the identifiers are identical or you will create two guest records.

 KEEP IN Mind as well you must have your UI options set to send ordrs to Ktichen if placed within xxx hours of due time.

Now place the order as you would ususally butwhen you click schedule order it will automatically schedule the order to the time we set for next day mode on the back end (this is ok). Set the prep-time you believe is needed that day or the time you want the kitchen to see the ticket (for me I do all the morning ders with the due time minus open time ex. an order for 12:30 will have a 2h30min prep time because we open at 10 and thats when I want to print the ticket. 

Now as you are still in next day mode you can run the credit card and have the customer apply the tip. 

Now go to the pending order screen on the pos and highlight thtat order you just took. DO NOT OPEN IT. Now on the overflow menu click reschedule  and put in the exact time you want the order. (This will keep the credit card in the authorized state should you need to make adjustments etc.) also just look at the credit crd payment date if its for a while because you might need to toggle next day mode, reschedule on the payment screen, and then, go back to normal mode and schedudle correctly on the pending order screeen.  (once you do this you should see order placed for x time and what time it is firiing.

Now DO NOT PRINT any tickets from the order screeen (try to use the hold button not send and the POS will autofire anywiay.)From the Pending order>Future Order screen however click and hold the future order you want to print until you can highlight multiple tickets, select all the tickets you want and click print prep tickets to stations. This is the only way the order will not fire and still print a ticket the day of.

THere are a number of pilot programs in the works to simplify this as well as I ahve spoke to many if not the entire product team about making this easier . 

Ill be more than happuy dto show you as it sounds more complicated than it is. 

One last key take-away is if you do add a tip when placing the order a good way to ensure that the payment is in next day more is to make sure that credit card charge is not on the order takers shift review fo r the day.

[MeganMitchell]

Thank you for the follow up on this, it is by no means a "easy" solution but it is a solution to try to get around the issues that we are having.