Somebody is standing at the desk with a bottle of water. Opening their reservation, finding the folio, opening the add-items drawer and posting from there works, and it is four screens for a two dollar sale. Quick Charge is the same posting in one drawer: find the guest, tap the item, and either put it on the room or take the money.
Two things it deliberately does not do, because both have been asked for. It never divides one bill between rooms, which is Separate Shares on the folio. And it always posts dated now, so a charge that belongs to yesterday belongs in the folio's add-items cart instead.
Two ways in
The first is the receipt icon in the top bar, which is on every screen in the product. It carries no text, so it is worth finding once: hovering it says Quick charge. That is the entry point for a walk-up, where you do not yet know whose charge this is.
The second is Quick charge in the more-options panel of a calendar tile. That one opens with the guest already chosen and their room resolved from the booking, which is the faster route when you are already looking at the reservation on the calendar.
Who the charge is for
Opened from the toolbar, the drawer starts on Who is this charge for? and a single search box, Search by guest name, room or confirmation number. All three work, and the room number is usually the fastest of them.
Three things about that box are worth knowing before you decide it is broken. It waits for two characters before it searches anything, so a single letter returns nothing. It then waits a quarter of a second after you stop typing rather than searching on every keystroke. And it shows at most eight results, with in-house guests first, because a walk-up charge almost always belongs to somebody who is in the building.
Every result carries the booking's status as a badge, the same status the calendar tile shows: Checked in, Stayover, Reserved, Tentative and the rest. Read it before you tap. Two guests with the same surname, one arriving tomorrow and one in the building, are one careless tap apart, and the badge is what separates them.
Picking somebody replaces the search box with a chip naming them, their room and their confirmation number after a hash. Change on that chip swaps to a different booking. If the property has multi-room charging switched on, that button reads Remove instead and the search box stays open, which is its own section below.
Bookings nothing can be posted to
Three statuses refuse charges, and the screen will not let you pick them: a cancelled booking, a no-show and a checked-out stay. Their rows sit at the bottom of the results, greyed, and hovering one says why. Tapping one puts the reason under the search box rather than silently doing nothing.
The reasoning is different in each case and worth knowing, because the right next action is different too. A cancelled booking and a no-show were never occupied, so a charge on either is a posting error that surfaces weeks later as a balance nobody can explain. A checked-out stay was occupied, and its bill has already been settled and handed over, so a charge landing on it afterwards is invisible to the guest and to you. The checked-out rule is the one Prostay enforces on the server as well, so it holds however the charge is attempted.
Opened from a calendar tile the block arrives a moment after the drawer does, because the status comes with the booking rather than with the tile. What you see is a banner across the top, Nothing can be posted to this reservation, and every finishing button greyed.
Building the charge
The body is two panes: your items on the left, the charge you are building on the right under This charge.
The left pane holds only the items flagged for this grid, which is deliberate and is set per item by Show on the Quick Charge grid. A grid of everything you sell would be unusable at a desk. Search items looks through all of them, and the chips above the grid filter by category, with All first and a More menu holding any categories that do not fit on one row.
Tap a tile to add it. Tap it again and the quantity goes up rather than a second line appearing, with one exception that is a feature rather than a quirk: a line you have already written a note on is left alone and a new line is added instead. A note describes one thing, so quietly applying it to a second unit would put a wrong explanation on the bill.
Three kinds of item behave differently from a plain priced one:
| Kind of item | What happens |
|---|---|
| An open-amount item | Its tile reads Open instead of a price and its line gets an Amount box. Nothing posts until there is a figure above zero in it, and the server refuses it as well as the screen. |
| An item that must be explained | Its note box is already open when the line appears, placeheld Note (required), and the charge will not post while it is empty. Everything else offers Note (optional) behind the note icon on the line. |
| A package | One tap adds one line here and posts as several lines on the folio, one per component. When those two counts differ, the line above the cart says so: five items, eleven folio lines. |
A price you can edit is a price the item allows you to edit. On anything else the box is read-only, and that is not the screen being protective: the server takes the catalogue price for those items regardless of what it is sent, so an editable-looking box would have been a lie.
The foot of the drawer carries Total, and under it the tax inside that figure when your property has an item tax that is not already in the price. That total is what the guest will owe. The rate comes from your item taxes, and the folio applies the same rate to the same lines, so the number you read out at the desk is the number that lands on the bill.
Two complaints appear in different places, which is worth knowing so you look in the right one. A cart with nothing in it complains under the cart. A charge with nobody to bill complains under the search box at the top, and puts the cursor back in it.
Charging it to the room
Charge to room does not post. It opens Check before posting, which restates who is being charged, every line with its quantity and amount, Subtotal, Tax and Total, and says in words that this posts to the room folio dated now and cannot be undone from here. Back to the cart returns, Post to the folio commits.
That screen exists because this is the one path with nothing else standing in its way. No money changes hands, nobody is asked to approve anything, and the guest is not present to notice. A mistyped room number and a correct-looking charge on a stranger's bill are the same two taps, and this is the screen that catches it. Read the name on it, not the total.
Taking cash, and counting it
Take cash opens a step built around counting what was handed over, because a cash drawer has to reconcile against what is physically in it at the end of a shift. Amount due sits at the top and does not move.
Notes received is a row of buttons, one per note that exists in your property's currency, largest first. Tap each note as the guest hands it over. A count appears on the button, and a list underneath shows what has been counted so far, with a minus button on each row for the note you tapped twice by mistake. Coins are not there, on the reasoning that nobody counts coins into a PMS.
Cash received then shows the counted total and goes read-only, because the count and a typed figure are two ways of saying the same thing and showing both would misrepresent what was counted. Clear the note count and type an amount underneath empties the count and hands the box back.
If you are not counting notes, the same box takes a figure directly, and two shortcuts sit under it. Exact fills in the amount due. Beside it are up to three round numbers above the amount due, worked out from the notes your currency actually has: on a bill of USD 73.03 they are 74, 75 and 80.
Change updates as you go, and it is the figure to read back to the guest. A bill of USD 73.03 settled with a 50, a 20 and a 5 shows USD 75.00 received and USD 1.97 change.
The button at the foot reads Confirm cash and then the amount, so the figure you are committing to is on the button you press. It refuses while the cash received is less than the amount due, and says so. It does not refuse an overpayment, because that is the ordinary case and the change figure is the answer to it.
What you counted is kept. The payment line on the folio records what was tendered, the change given and the notes counted, so a drawer that is twenty dollars out at the end of a shift can be checked against the line rather than guessed at.
Taking a card
Take card records a card payment you have already taken on your own card machine. Nothing here talks to the terminal, so this step is you copying down what the machine printed.
| Field | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Card type | The brands your property has ticked for payments taken at the desk in Payment Options. With none ticked it holds a single entry reading Other, which takes the payment rather than blocking it. |
| Last 4 digits | Four digits, and it ignores anything else you type. Optional, and worth the four keystrokes: it is how a folio line is matched to a line on a card statement. |
| Approval / receipt number | The number on the slip, which the field says by way of its placeholder, From the card machine slip. This is the only required field on this step. |
The approval number is required because it is the only thing that ties this sale to that terminal transaction. Months later, when the cardholder disputes a charge, the folio line carries the brand, the last four digits and that number, and answering the dispute is a matter of reading them off. Without it there is a payment of the right amount on the right day and nothing connecting it to the slip in the drawer. The field says as much underneath itself, and Confirm card and its amount will not go through while it is empty.
The same charge on several rooms
A tour group's dinner, a conference's coffee break, a dive boat's sanctuary fees: the same charge, on fifteen rooms. Two things have to be true before the panel offers it. The property needs Charge several rooms at once switched on, and your role needs the permission for it, which is listed below and is marked sensitive.
With both, the search box stays open after you pick the first booking, relabelled Charge another room the same amount. Add as many as you need. Each chip gets a Remove button, adding the same booking twice is ignored, and the foot of the drawer changes to show Per room beside the per-room figure and the room count beside the combined one. The finishing button counts the rooms, and so does the review screen behind it.
Every room is charged the full amount, to its own folio. This is not a way to split one bill, and reaching for it to do that produces fifteen copies of a bill instead of fifteen shares of one.
One consequence that is easy to miss: stock comes off once per unit per room. Fifteen rooms charged one bottle of water each is fifteen bottles out of stock, which is correct and is worth knowing before you charge fifteen rooms an item you track.
Who can do which part
Quick Charge is split across four permissions, in the Folio group under Reservations in Users, Roles and Permissions. They are worth granting separately, because posting a minibar item and being trusted with the till are different jobs.
| Permission | What it allows |
|---|---|
| Add an item transaction to a folio | Posting an item at all, here or in the folio's own cart. Without it the top bar has no receipt icon. |
| Post a charge from Quick Charge, outside the folio | The entry points themselves. It is separate on purpose: a property can leave the folio open to the whole desk without putting a posting button in everybody's top bar. Both this and the one above are needed before the icon appears. |
| Add a payment transaction to a folio | Take cash and Take card. Without it the drawer still posts to the room and offers no way to take money, which is the right shape for a receptionist who does not hold the till. |
| Post one charge to several rooms at once | Multi-room charging, on top of the property switch for it. Marked sensitive, because one careless action here writes to every folio in the list. |
Undoing a posted charge is not in that list and is not in this drawer. It is a void on the folio, under its own permission, on the reasoning that posting is a desk job and removing revenue is a supervisor's signature.
Things that catch people out
A quick charge is always dated now. There is no date field, and the charge carries the moment you posted it. If it belongs to yesterday, post it from the folio's add-items cart, which does let you backdate.
It lands on the property's default folio. There is no folio picker here. On a reservation whose charges have been split across folios, a quick charge goes to the default one and moving it afterwards is a folio transfer. Post from the folio itself when the destination matters.
Nothing posts half way. Every booking in the list is loaded and checked before anything is written to any of them, so a charge that fails fails whole. The drawer keeps your cart and says it could not post the charge, and you can fix the problem and post again without rebuilding it.
The confirmation is one line and it goes away. After posting, the drawer says what went where and what was settled, and the cart empties under it. If you need that later, the reservation's activity log carries one entry per posting, naming Quick Charge and the folio the lines landed on, and the folio carries the lines themselves.
Two guests, one surname. The single commonest mis-post at a desk is the right name on the wrong booking. The status badge on the result and the room number on the chip are both there to catch it, and Check before posting is the last chance to.