Our guide to checking out clients and processing payments covers a straightforward checkout. This article covers everything else — the discount, the customer paying half now, the payment you keyed in wrong, and the refund.
The cart
When you check out a booking you'll see three figures:
Total — what's owed, after any discount.
Left to pay — what's still outstanding as you add payments.
Change Due — appears when a payment exceeds what's owed, so you know what to hand back.
Changing a price or applying a discount
Both are done in the cart, before you take payment. Click the service in the cart — anywhere on its row, or the pencil icon — to open Edit Service.
Change the Price if the service should cost something different today.
For a discount, choose Percentage or Fixed Amount, then enter the Discount Percentage or Discount Amount.
Add a Reason — the box appears once you've entered a discount. Optional, but see below.
Click Apply.
The Total updates immediately, and payments are taken against the new figure.
👀 Apply doesn't save anything on its own. Your change is kept when you click Save (unpaid) or Complete Booking. Close the checkout before then and it's gone.
👀 A new price and a discount aren't the same thing. Change the price when the work itself was different — a longer treatment, or the wrong tier booked. Use a discount when the work was the same and you chose to take less. A price change is written to the booking's History, with the old and new price and who changed it; a discount isn't.
👀 A discount can't be bigger than the price — the field turns red and Apply stays greyed out.
Changing a price or discount needs the Update checkout permission. Once a booking's checkout is complete, its services can't be edited here.
💡 Always record a reason. It's the difference between a discount you can explain and one that just looks like money missing. When your sales figures are down and you're working out why, "20% — first visit offer" tells you something; a blank field tells you nothing. It also makes discounting visible, which quietly discourages the habit forming.
👀 Percentage or fixed? Percentage scales with the service, so it stays fair across a price list. Fixed amounts are better for a specific promotion — £10 off a first visit — where you want the same value regardless of what they book.
Splitting a payment
A customer can pay with more than one method — part card, part cash, a voucher plus the balance. There's no limit.
Choose the first Payment Method: Cash, Card, Bank Transfer or Voucher.
Enter the Amount — this doesn't have to be the full total.
Click Add Payment.
Watch Left to pay, then repeat with the next method until it reaches zero.
Click Complete Booking.
Each payment can carry a Note — useful for a voucher number or a bank reference.
When they're not paying it all today
If the customer is paying some now and the rest later, add what they've paid and use Save (unpaid) rather than Complete Booking.
The payments are recorded against the booking and the balance stays outstanding. Come back to it when they settle up, add the final payment, then Complete Booking.
👀 Deposits already paid count automatically. If they paid a deposit when booking, it's already recorded — you're only collecting the balance.
Fixing a mistake
Keyed in the wrong amount, or picked the wrong method?
Before you complete the booking: click the bin icon next to the payment to remove it, then add it again correctly. Only payments you've added at checkout have a bin icon — a deposit or fee taken online can't be removed here.
After you've completed it: a deposit or fee taken through Stripe needs a refund (below). A payment you recorded at checkout by mistake is a bookkeeping correction — contact support if you need a completed booking's payments adjusted.
💡 Get into the habit of checking Left to pay reads zero before clicking Complete Booking. It's the quickest way to catch a mistyped amount.
Refunding a payment
Refunds are issued from the booking's payments list.
Open the booking and view its Booking Payments.
Choose to refund the payment.
Confirm at Are you sure? — the warning is accurate, you cannot undo this action.
The payment's status changes to Refunded.
👀 Only payments taken through Stripe can be refunded through Styler — deposits, and no-show or late cancellation fees. A payment you recorded at checkout, including one marked Card, never went through Styler, so there's nothing for us to reverse. Settle those with the customer directly, the same way you took the money, and keep your own record.
👀 Only paid payments can be refunded. If a payment failed or is still pending, there's nothing to refund and you'll see an error. Check its status first.
If a refund fails, the message usually comes straight from Stripe — it'll say why. The most common cause is insufficient funds in your Stripe balance, which happens when you've been paid out since taking the payment.
FAQs
❓ How long does a refund take to reach the customer?
That's down to Stripe and the customer's bank, typically several working days. It leaves your Stripe balance immediately.
❓ Can I refund part of a payment?
Refunds apply to a payment as recorded. If you took the money as several separate payments, you can refund them individually — another reason to record a split payment as a split rather than one lump sum.
❓ Do discounts show in my reports?
Yes. The Staff Revenue report values each service at its price after any discount, and the Sales report shows your discounts as a line of their own. A price you've changed isn't a discount, so it doesn't appear in that line — the new price is simply what the service was worth. See Using Reports in the Styler Hub.
❓ A refunded payment still shows on the booking. Is that right?
Yes. The payment stays on the record marked Refunded rather than disappearing, so you keep an accurate history of what happened.