Final payments and tips

The final payment is what is left once the session is done. Open the booking and tap Collect Payment. Maelo works the number out for you: the full price of the appointment, plus any tax, minus the deposit they already paid.

Every figure on that screen is editable before you charge anything, so a session that ran two hours over, or a piece you decided to knock money off, is a quick edit rather than a problem. The deposit line sits underneath marked Already collected, so you can see it has come off exactly once.

Tax is calculated on the full price of the appointment, not on the balance you are charging today. A deposit is a prepayment, so the tax on the whole job falls due when the job is delivered. That is why the tax figure is bigger than a percentage of today's amount.

Under Payment Options you get everything you have switched on, in one list.

• •Tap to Pay sits at the top. Your client holds their card or phone against yours. See Tap to Pay on iPhone.
• •Charge Card on File uses the card they paid their deposit with, if you kept it. It shows you the brand and the last four digits so you know what you are about to charge.
• •Pay by Card is marked Customer pays online with any card. It sends the amount to their hub so they can pay in their own time, and you can re-send it or change the amount afterwards.
• •Your own methods, such as cash, a bank transfer, Interac, Venmo, Zelle or Cash App. These never touch Stripe. See payments outside Stripe.

Which of those appear, and in what order, comes from Settings, Payments, Final Payments. Star the methods you use most and they sit at the top. The rest tuck under More payment options, and anything switched off never shows at all.

Turn on I charge tax on appointments in Tax Settings on the Final Payments panel, then use Add Tax Line to save each tax you normally charge with its own name and rate. Regions that stack taxes get a line each, for example GST and PST, and Maelo shows you the Combined tax rateunderneath.

Those saved taxes are prefills for the payment form, not a rate on your quotes. Quotes read + applicable tax with no number, and you pick which tax actually applies when you take the payment. That keeps it right even on a guest spot in another region.

Tipping is on by default and lives at the bottom of the same panel. Enable tips turns it off entirely. Below it, Tip option 1, 2 and 3 are the percentages you want offered, set to 15, 18 and 20 until you change them.

Calculate tip chooses whether a percentage is worked out Before tax or After tax. Before tax is the default and means the tip is a percentage of your work rather than of your work plus the government's share.

Maelo's fee is charged once, on the deposit. A final payment carries no Maelo cut at all, and neither do quick payments, Tap to Pay or no-show fees. Tips are yours in full.

Stripe's card processing cost still applies to anything paid by card, and it comes out of your balance the way it does on any charge. Cash and bank transfers cost you nothing because no card is involved. The breakdown for each individual payment is on the Payments tab of Financial.

Halfway down the Final Payments panel is Preview Final Payment modal. It opens the real Collect Payment screen with sample details, showing exactly the methods you have switched on and the order they appear in. Nothing is charged and no client is contacted.