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, you can now also hold or release a single item. 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:

Holding a single item

You can also hold or release one item in a cart, not just the whole guest. This is useful when a guest wants to pay for most of their cart now but leave one item for later, for example an auction item they are still deciding on.

Open the guest's cart. Each line has a Hold button; click it to hold just that item. A held line shows an On hold badge and is left out of checkout, but it stays in the cart at full quantity. Click Release to include it again.

Holding is not the same as removing. Remove deletes the line from the cart. Hold leaves the line in the cart and only keeps it out of checkout until you release it.

Releasing one item on a held guest

If the whole guest is on hold, you can still release a single item to charge for just that one. On a held guest, the cart shows a note that the guest is on hold, and each line offers a Release button. A released line shows a Released badge and will be charged at the next checkout, while everything else stays on hold.

How holds behave at checkout

Item holds carry through to both bulk checkout and the single checkout page.

• In bulk checkout, a fully held guest is lifted into the Payment Holds panel and left out of the charge, whether the whole guest is on hold or every item is held individually. Use Remove Hold or Release Items to bring them back in.
• On the checkout page, held items are already left out. You can also take any line off that payment with its remove (x) control. That only removes it from this payment, and the line stays in the guest's cart. Use Add back to include it again.

Because neither a hold nor a removed line deletes anything from the cart, a partial checkout is safe: the items you did not charge for are still there for next time.

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. Remove All Holds now clears both guest and item holds.

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.