Payment Holds for Guest Carts

Some guests hand you a card at registration and then tell you, at the table, that they intend to settle up with a check, cash, or a gift from their donor-advised fund. Their card is still on file, so the next bulk checkout will charge it unless something stops it. A payment hold is that something.

A hold marks one guest as "do not auto-charge." It behaves like the red internal note you already use at check-in: it shows up in red everywhere that guest appears, so whoever is working the room sees it without having to ask. When you are done for the night, you can lift every hold on the event with one button instead of clearing them guest by guest.

What a hold does, and what it leaves alone

A hold only blocks the automatic charge. It does not touch the cart, the totals, the fees, the tip, or anything the guest owes. Nothing is written off and nothing is refunded. The balance sits there, visible, waiting for you to collect it the way the guest asked.

With a hold on, a held guest is left out of bulk checkout entirely. If someone tries to process that guest's payment individually, the charge is refused with a message telling them to remove the hold first, so a hold cannot be worked around by accident.

Good to know: holds are only meaningful for a guest who has a card on file. A guest with no preauthorized card was never going to be auto-charged, and is checked out manually either way.

Putting a hold on a guest

1. Open your event and go to Manage Participants.
2. Find the guest and open their card.
3. In the row of quick actions, next to Add note and Tags, click Payment Hold.

The card immediately shows a red banner saying the guest will not be auto-charged, and the button changes to Remove Hold. Click it again to lift the hold on that one guest.

Where the hold shows up

Once set, the hold travels with the guest across the screens your team is actually looking at during an event:

Bulk checkout with holds in place

Open Bulk Checkout as usual. Held guests are lifted out of the main table and listed underneath it in their own panel, headed Payment Holds with a count, along with each guest's cart total. Their totals are still shown, because you still need to know what to collect. They are simply not part of what the Process Payments run will charge.

Everyone else is charged exactly as before. Nothing about the rest of the run changes.

Clearing every hold at once

At the top of the Payment Holds panel is a Remove All Holds button. Click it, confirm, and every hold on the event is lifted in one pass. You get a message telling you how many guests were cleared, and the checkout view reloads so those guests move up into the main charge list, ready to be included in the next run.

Two things to be careful about.

Remove All Holds covers the whole event. It clears every held guest on the campaign, not only the ones matching the filter you happen to have on. Use the per-guest Remove Hold button when you want to lift one.

Lifting a hold makes the card fair game again. Once a hold is off, that guest is included in the next bulk checkout and their card will be charged. Only clear a hold when you have either collected the payment or decided that charging the card is what you want.

How this fits into an event night

1. At check-in or at the table: a guest says they will pay by check, cash, or DAF. Put a payment hold on them, and add an internal note if there is a detail worth passing along, such as "check being mailed Monday."
2. Through the evening: anyone looking that guest up sees the hold and knows not to run the card.
3. At the end of the night: run bulk checkout. Everyone with a card and no hold is charged. The held guests are listed separately with what they owe, which is your collection list.
4. Afterward: record the checks and cash as they come in. If a promised payment never arrives and you decide to fall back on the card on file, remove that guest's hold and charge them.
5. Closing out the event: once every held balance has been settled one way or another, use Remove All Holds to tidy up.