As soon as your quote has been added, if you selected Card as the payment type, you can immediately pre-authorise a payment from the customer's card. Pre-authorising a payment allows you to ringfence a sum of money from your customer's account, ready for you to take a payment at a later date. This will show in the customer's bank as a figure due to you, usually greyed out.
This pre-authorisation will last either 28 or 30 days, depending on the customer's bank or building society. So, if the payment is not going to be captured for more than a month, it is best to wait before pre-authorising the payment. Otherwise, proceed by clicking on the Auth button on your quote.
This will open the payment window. The customer billing information will be pulled through into the left hand column based on the information that is against the customer. You can edit these fields if you need to.
The amount will also be populated from the quote, but you can use the Pre-auth Extra drop down to select a percentage. We recommend doing this as this will allow the same payment to be used even if the customer ends up taking more product than originally quoted. The amount pre-authorised is not necessarily the amount captured, but it is worth explaining to the customer about why you will be pre-authorising more than was quoted.
The other part of the payment window I want to draw your attention to is the Save Card or Don't Save toggle switch. In the screenshot, this card information will be saved against this customer. Clicking on Save Card will switch the toggle to Don't Save which would not retain the payment information.
Once all of the information in the payment window is correct, click Authorise Card.
You will now see that your pre-authorised amount is displayed in yellow on your quote. Hovering over the i button will tell you when and by whom the payment was authorised. You don't need to do anything else now until it is time to take the payment.
Once you are ready to take the payment, you can do so from the order's pop-up window, accessed by clicking on one of the jobs either on the Shipping screen, or in the Status column of Customers / Quotes.
As in the screenshot above, the amount to capture for the payment will automatically reflect what was calculated on job completion, even if more product was taken than originally quoted. You can, however, type in the amount box if the amount you wish to take is more or less. Remember, you cannot capture more than was quoted. If you need to, you can
cancel this payment and take another.
If all seems well, click on Card Capture to take the payment.
You will now see that the payment column reflects, in green, the amount actually captured. The time, date, and amount will be shown by hovering over the i, alongside the information already stored from the pre-authorisation, allowing you to track how much for and by whom each payment was taken. The background of this column will also be shaded green to show that the status of the order has changed to Paid.