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Card brands at the till — pick which networks you accept

If you take cards, your bank machine settles each brand separately — Visa to one line on the report, MasterCard to another, AMEX to a third. That only reconciles against the till if every card payment the cashier punches in also carries the brand. A single “Card” button doesn’t tell you which network the customer paid with, and at end of day you’re guessing. This page is for the owner picking which brands to expose, and for the cashier who’ll see one button per brand on the payment screen.

What it does

Your venue has a list of accepted card networks. Once you’ve ticked the brands you take, the cashier’s payment screen replaces the single Card button with one button per brand — Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, whatever you picked. When the cashier takes a card payment, they tap the brand the customer’s card actually carries. The receipt then prints with that brand on it, and the back-office report can group payments by brand to match against the settlement statement your bank sends you the next morning.

If you don’t tick any brand, the till stays on the old single-Card behaviour — fine for venues that don’t reconcile by brand, or for venues whose card acquirer settles everything as one lump. Most venues that read this page want the per-brand split, because the alternative is “did that ฿4,200 the bank credited us today come from cards or from QR? I’ll have to add it up by hand.”

The brand isn’t a billing decision — your bank acquirer charges what your bank acquirer charges, regardless of which button the cashier tapped. Picking the right brand is purely about reconciliation: making sure end-of-day numbers match what the bank says hit your account.

The rule

The brands you tick are the brands the cashier sees. If your bank settles Visa, MasterCard, and AMEX separately, tick all three. If you don’t take AMEX (some venues don’t because the merchant fee is higher), don’t tick it — keeping it off the till stops a cashier from punching it by accident.

How to use it

Setting up the brand list (owner)

Open Admin → Settings → POS terminal. Scroll past the auto-lock and PromptPay sections to Accepted card brands. You’ll see seven tiles: Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, JCB, UnionPay, Discover, Diners Club. Tap each brand you accept — the tile turns blue. Tap Save changes. Done.

Two things to know:

  • This is permission-gated, and you can delegate it. The owner can change it out of the box. If you’d rather let a trusted manager look after payment settings without making them a full owner, give their role the Configure payment methods permission — they’ll then be able to edit this list (and the PromptPay setup) while everyone else sees it read-only. The shift lead at the till can’t add or remove brands mid-service unless they hold that permission. Set it on the Roles page.
  • The order is fixed. Whatever you tick, the cashier sees them in the canonical order (Visa first, MasterCard second, etc.) — not in the order you ticked. This keeps muscle memory consistent across venues.

If you change which brands you accept later (say you finally take AMEX), come back here, tick it, save. The new tile appears on the cashier’s screen on the next payment — no terminal restart.

Taking a card payment (cashier)

Take the order as usual. Tap Pay when the customer is ready. On the payment screen, instead of a single 💳 Card button, you now see the brand row your owner set up. Ask the customer “which card?” if you can’t see the front of their card — most people will say “Visa” or “MasterCard” without looking. Tap that tile. The Pay button at the bottom stays disabled until you’ve picked a brand — that’s deliberate, because skipping the brand makes end-of-day reconciliation harder than it needs to be.

If a customer hands you a card brand you haven’t seen before (a regional network, a prepaid card from somewhere unusual), pick the closest match or ask the owner to add it to the list later. The till accepts the payment either way — picking the wrong brand for one transaction is a small reconciliation footnote, not a blocker.

Fixing a wrong brand after the fact

You’re human, you punched Visa when it was actually MasterCard. The fix is on the Reopen Bill page — short version: tap the Actions drawer on the closed order, tap Reopen Order, void the wrong card payment, take it again with the right brand, close the table. Manager PIN required and the bill has to have been closed today.

Worked example

Friday evening at iO Osteria. The owner, Marco, took half an hour on Monday morning to tick Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, and JCB in his POS terminal settings — those are the four brands his Kasikornbank machine settles separately. He left UnionPay off (no Chinese tour groups at this neighbourhood spot) and Discover/Diners off (his bank doesn’t even acquire them).

The order. A table of four finishes a Margherita, a Quattro Stagioni, a Carbonara, a Tiramisù, and a bottle of Chianti — ฿2,840 total. The customer hands Aor (the cashier) a black AMEX card.

The payment. Aor taps Pay in the cart. The payment screen shows the five payment-method chips (Cash, Card, QR, Transfer, On account). She taps 💳 Card. Below the chip row, a second row of four brand tiles slides in: Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, JCB. She taps AMEX. The bottom button now reads Pay ฿2,840. She taps it, slides the card on the bank terminal, the bank terminal says Approved, and she closes the table.

End of day. Marco sits down with his bank machine’s settlement report and his POS day report. The bank says: Visa ฿18,400, MasterCard ฿12,600, AMEX ฿4,200. The POS report says: Visa ฿18,400, MasterCard ฿12,600, AMEX ฿4,200. He spots the match in three seconds, signs off the day, goes home. Last year, before the per-brand split, this took him forty minutes and usually ended with “close enough, I’ll figure out the ฿340 difference tomorrow.”

That ฿340 difference, when he finally tracked it down, was an AMEX payment a cashier had punched as plain Card. The customer’s slip said AMEX, the bank settled AMEX, but the till had no idea. The per-brand split makes that mistake impossible — the cashier can’t take a card payment without picking a brand.