Deposits

A deposit is what a client pays to take a date off you. You set it per session while you are building the quote, so a long piece split over three sittings can ask for a different amount each time.

Approve a request, and on the sessions step every session has a pencil icon. Open it and you get Total and Deposit side by side, in your own currency. Total is the full price of that sitting. Deposit is the slice they pay now. Both are plain amounts, so charge whatever you normally charge, whether that is a flat booking fee or half the price.

The review step before you send shows Total Cost and Deposit Required added up across every session, which is the pair of numbers your client is about to see.

A deposit is charged through your Stripe account, so Maelo will not let you send a quote asking for one until that account can actually receive it. If it cannot, you get Stripe connection required to Send Quote on the review step, with a button through to the setting.

This is a guard rail, not an obstacle. Without it your client would pick a date, pick a time, tap to pay and hit an error on the last click with no way forward. See setting up Stripe.

Your client pays from their own hub, on a Stripe checkout page carrying your name. The moment it clears, three things happen at once. The session is locked in and moves to Booked. The money lands in your Stripe balance. You get an email and a notification reading that they are booked in, and the request drops out of your inbox.

Where a client is booking several sittings at once, they pay them in order. Maelo will not let somebody pay for session three while session one is still unpaid, and one card entry covers however many they are taking, so either all of them go through or none of them do.

A deposit is a prepayment, not an extra charge. When you collect the balance on the day, Maelo takes the full price of the appointment, adds any tax, and then subtracts the deposit once. The client is never asked for it twice, and the Collect Payment screen shows it on its own line marked Already collected.

Tax is worked out on the full price of the appointment rather than on the balance left over. That is the correct treatment of a prepayment, and it is why the tax figure looks higher than a percentage of the amount you are charging today. More on that in final payments and tips.

Set the deposit to 0 and the quote goes out with nothing to pay. The client books the date straight from their hub and you settle up in person. That path stays open whether or not you have ever connected Stripe, so an artist who works in cash can run the whole of Maelo without it.

A deposit is the one charge Maelo takes a cut of, and the rate is 5% of your listed price. Final payments, quick payments, Tap to Pay and no-show fees carry no Maelo fee at all. Stripe's own processing cost applies to every card charge on top.

Whether your client covers those on top of your price, or you absorb them out of your payout, is yours to choose with the Who covers the fee slider in Settings, Payments, Platform Fees. Either way it is one all-in price at checkout, never a separate line the client has to puzzle over. The full worked example lives on the fees page.

You refund a deposit from Financial. Open the Payments tab, find the charge, and refund it in full or in part from inside the payment. Whether a deposit is refundable at all is your policy, not a Maelo rule, so say what you do in your booking policies before anybody pays. The details are in refunds and disputes.