Payments & Stripe

Everything about how money moves. Set this up before you send a booking with a deposit attached.

Stripe connections

Fairground 360 uses Stripe Connect. You connect your own Stripe account and the money lands in your bank, not ours.

Why there can be more than one

A fair board and a rental operation often settle to different bank accounts. So your account keeps a registry of connections, and each side designates one active connection at a time:

• Rentals connection — bookings, rental invoices, security deposits
• Fairground connection — vendors, sponsors, entertainment, tickets, entry fees

Most accounts connect one and assign it to both. Connect two when the money genuinely needs to separate.

Connecting

Connect Stripe takes you through Stripe's OAuth flow and brings you back with the connection in your registry, showing the business name, the email, and the capabilities Stripe has enabled.

Then assign it to a side. A connection that is not assigned is in the registry but not taking money.

Disconnecting

Disconnecting is guarded. If a connection is active for a side that has open invoices, you are stopped — otherwise you would orphan money in flight.

You never pick a Stripe account at payment time

Every flow resolves its connection from the record's context. A rentals invoice uses the rentals connection; a vendor invoice uses the fairground one. Assign once, and it is right every time after.

Payment methods

Credit card

On by default.

Surcharge — a percentage added to card payments to pass processing cost to the payer. Shown to them before they commit.

Check your state's rules

Card surcharging is regulated and prohibited in some jurisdictions and by some card network rules. Confirm what applies to you before switching it on.

ACH (bank transfer)

Enable it and set the message renters see.

Cheaper than card on large invoices and slower to settle — a few business days, during which the payment sits pending in the ledger with an expected arrival date.

Worth making prominent on large rentals. The fee difference on a $6,000 hall booking is real money.

Mail a check

Enable it, set the address to mail to, and write the message. It puts your address on the public invoice page instead of leaving people to guess.

Service fees

Percentage and flat fees on card and ACH payments. Each payment records the amount before the fee and the fee itself, so your reporting shows gross and net without arithmetic.

Distinct from the named, reusable invoice fees in Service Fees.

Booking defaults

Default booking deposit percentage

What a new booking's deposit defaults to. 25% unless you change it. Override per booking as a percentage or a fixed amount.

Default security deposit amount

A flat figure that fills itself in on new bookings. Override where the risk is different. See Security Deposits.

Tax

A default tax rate applied to new invoices, overridable per invoice. Tax is a flat per-invoice rate rather than per line item.

Testing

Everything works in Stripe test mode. Run one booking end to end — send, sign, pay a deposit, raise the invoice, take a payment, issue a refund — before you point a real renter at it.

Related

• Payments — the ledger, refunds, reconciliation
• Card Readers — taking cards in person
• Invoices — numbering, sending, reminders