Paid out automatically, or recorded and owed
A rival pays every vendor out from the one transaction. Our payouts screen records what each kitchen is owed and says the transfer is yours. Both are ticks.
The cell in our comparison table that moved furthest on Sunday was the money split. The row asks who gets what when one guest payment covered three kitchens, and for the QR ordering product we copy it had read as a blank, their site not saying. Their food-hall page says it in its first sentence: items from different vendors in one basket, one transaction at checkout, and every vendor automatically paid out. A blog post of theirs adds that each vendor receives its share of the transaction. The cell is now a tick, dated.
Two ticks that mean different things
Our cell in the same row is also a tick, and it is worth being exact about what ours means, because the two ticks are not the same promise. Theirs is a transfer: they take the guest’s card payment and move each vendor’s share to that vendor. Ours is a ledger: when one order holds lines from three kitchens, each kitchen’s lines are its own takings, the commission is worked out on each kitchen’s own figure, standing rent lands on every payout run by itself under its own name, and the payouts screen shows what each kitchen is owed and what has already gone to it.
Then the screen’s own small print says the thing the marketing page also says: HelchPOS records a payout, it does not move the money. The transfer is yours to make from your own bank, and when you have made it, you record it and the balance moves. Card processing is not switched on in the product, so there is no pool of guest money sitting with us to pay anyone out of, and we would rather the comparison said that plainly than let two identical ticks imply two identical products.
Which one a food hall wants
Automatic payout is convenient, and it comes with the other side of the same coin: the platform is holding your vendors’ money until it pays it out, on its own schedule, under its own terms. A ledger that is always right about who is owed what, with the transfer made by the hall on the day it chooses, is slower by one bank transfer and keeps the money where the hall can see it. Some halls will want the first. We built the second, and the row on the comparison page now shows both as what they are rather than as one tick each.