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What is not switched on yet

Taking payments through us is not live. The commission engine that works out the fee is built and running; the money movement behind it is not, and it needs an acquirer and the regulatory work that comes with holding other people’s money. Until then everything on this site is free because there is nothing to charge for — which is a better reason than a promotion.

And because we do not take the card, the terminal is a second, independent record of the same money — so the product compares them. Type the end-of-day total off the card machine, or photograph the receipt and have it read, and the day says whether the two agree. It never reports a bare gap: the terminal took £42.00 more than the till recorded is a sale put through the machine and never rung in, and the till recorded £42.00 more is a sale marked as card the machine never saw. Those are different problems with different people to talk to. A tip the terminal collected comes out first, because otherwise a perfectly reconciled day looks wrong every day; a refund the till cannot say the method of is said rather than netted off; and a reading from a photograph is a proposal until somebody has checked it against the receipt and put their name to it.

The engine does show its working. Any month, for any kitchen, prints as a receipt: what was taken, what came off for discounts, refunds, service charge and VAT, which band each pound fell in, and what that comes to as a percentage. A commission you cannot check by hand is one you argue about every month, with a landlord you have to keep working with.

And each kitchen has its own Money screen for the other side of that: what is not in a payout yet, the payout the hall has already dated, and every one that has been paid, failed or cancelled. It says which days that money is for and when the next payout is due — a real date, worked out from the venue’s own close of day and the working days its bank takes, weekends skipped. A hall that raises payouts by hand has promised no date, and the screen says that instead of inventing one. The figure is labelled as an estimate on the screen itself, because the hall can still put rent and other charges against it when it builds the run — and a payout that failed puts its trade back into what is owed rather than sitting in a list looking settled. Open any one of them and it shows its working: who paid whom and into which account, the period it covers, and every sale that made it up — switchable between what the customer paid and what was left after commission. That per-sale commission is the commission the order actually attracted rather than a share of the period, because a tiered rate means two identical orders in one month can genuinely differ. The schedule behind it is the kitchen's own: a close of day per weekday, so a late bar's night stays in one payout instead of being split across two, and the number of working days its bank takes — which is what every "arrives Thursday" on the screen is worked out from. Each close is picked from a list that runs into the next morning and names the day, because "2am" on its own does not say whether it means tonight or tomorrow. Changing which account the money is said to go to needs the password again — asked for by the server, not by the page, so it is not something a browser can be talked out of. A food hall can charge for running the platform, not just take a commission. A processing fee, set by the hall and added to the customer's bill — a percentage or a fixed amount, named in the hall's own words, and always capped, because an uncapped percentage turns a £200 group order into a £10 "processing fee" and that is the kind of line somebody disputes. Chargeable on QR, on kiosks and at the counter separately, and only above a basket size worth processing. The guest sees it named on the bill before they pay. It never becomes a kitchen's takings: it is out of what the hall owes them and out of the commission base, so switching it on cannot raise anybody's commission bill for money they did not take. On a hall basket it is charged once, for the basket — not once per counter. The screen also says what is actually wrong with a kitchen's money, when something is: no bank account named, a payout dated to leave that nobody has marked paid, takings from a month ago still in no payout. When nothing is wrong it says nothing — a panel that always has advice in it is a panel people stop reading, and then they scroll past the one that mattered. The same screen is on the register under Reports, so a vendor behind their own counter can see it without opening a laptop — everything except the settlement note fits the glass without scrolling, and a till account gets the takings and not the payouts, because a tablet on a counter is not the place for them. The money still moves by bank transfer, outside HelchPOS. This is the record of it, not the rail.