It’s been our experience working with SOCS owners over the years that you want to offer a number of methods for suite owners/renters to pay for the catering of their event. These methods include:
- Credit Card collection
- Bill Card
- Get Card at Event
- Check
- Pre-paid
- Paid at Event
- Cash at Event
- Invoice
- Pre-Event
- Post-Event
Normally, the patron is billed post event, in order to account for any adjustments to the order made during the event. In rare cases, the patron prefers to be pre-billed.
SOCS v1.0 accommodated CC collection (post-event processing), Check & Cash payment methods, but not any form of invoicing OR pre-event CC or e-check processing). To assist SOCS owners’ PCI compliance, the order and payment detail was GPG 256-bit encrypted on the fly and sent to the catering managers. No CC info was ever stored online. However, as SPAM blockers became more strict, periodically orders/payment detail would get trapped by the spam filter.
The SOCS v2 re-write, now deploys a more traditional e-store (fill cart, then checkout) structure. This allows you to accept CC’s, Checks, or Cash payments as well as Invoice patrons.
- To collect CC info for post-processing, SOCS v2 will temporarily store partial CC data w/ the order. The remaining details are sent via email to the catering manager. Once the catering manager collects the stored portion and merges it w/ the emailed portion, it is manually processed and automagically removed from the SOCS system. You will need a merchant account and POS or virtual terminal solution, in house. If you do not have one already, we recommend Heartland Global Payments
- To collect CC info for pre-processing, we can activate the built-in Paypal payment plugin OR the built-in Heartland SecureSubmit plugin OR we may be able to custom install an alternate payment gateway (additional cost). Both Paypal and Heartland require you to have an account w/ them (as would any alternate gateway/processor such as Stripe, Square, Authorizenet, etc.). Paypal is fairly common, however, the cost can be higher than Heartland AND take longer to get your funds into your bank. We have partnered w/ Heartland because they have led the industry in transparency, integrity and security AND wrote the book on the Merchant Bill of Rights, literally.
- To invoice, we can activate the built-in Invoicing plugin and you may generate a PDF emailable invoice.