Deposits

A deposit is how a venue stops losing a chair, a table or an hour to someone who never turns up. Qaema Book can ask for one, but it never holds the money: a transfer goes to your bank or wallet, and a card is charged into your own payment account. Everything on this page is set in the Deposit section of /app/bookings, and deposits are part of the Pro plan.

The three ways to ask

Off. The default, and today’s behaviour. No deposit is asked for, and a guest’s booking confirms itself the moment they make it. Nothing on this page applies.

Bank or STC Pay transfer. You publish your own details — an STC Pay number, a bank name, an IBAN, a note, in English and Arabic — and the guest sees them on their confirmation page. They transfer the money themselves and tell you they did. Nothing is connected to Qaema, and no payment account is needed. You need at least one of those four fields filled in; a guest cannot transfer to nothing.

Card, into your own account. You connect your own Moyasar account in Setup: the secret key, the publishable key, and the currency the account settles in. The card form is shown on the guest’s confirmation page and the charge lands in your account. We store the secret key encrypted and never show it to you again — if you lose it, replace it with a new one. A venue set to card deposits with no account connected cannot publish its booking page, and Setup says so rather than letting it fail later when a guest tries to pay.

If your payment account settles in a different currency than the venue prices in, we refuse the deposit rather than charge the wrong amount: guests book with no deposit asked for, and Setup shows a warning. Connect an account in the venue’s own currency.

How much

Four ways to size it, whichever way you collect:

• A fixed amount — the same figure on every booking.
• Per guest — the amount multiplied by the party size or the seats taken.
• The full price — the booking’s own total, which is a prepayment rather than a deposit. A service with no price (“price on request”) cannot be quoted this way, so those bookings go through with no deposit asked for.
• A share of the total — a percentage of the booking’s total, from 1 to 100, rounded to the nearest unit. Like the full price, it can’t be worked out for a service with no price, so those bookings go through with no deposit asked for. It’s how a place asks for its Pay now amount.

The security deposit at a place

A place can also ask for a security deposit. It’s charged in the same payment as the pay-now amount, recorded separately so the two never blur, and refunded automatically 48 hours after check-out unless you keep part of it for damage on Today. On a bank transfer, the stay is marked for you to return it instead. A refund you record for the pay-now amount waits until the security deposit has been settled. The whole flow, including what happens when a refund fails, is on Places, stays and halls.

A place venue with no payment account connected and no transfer details starts with deposits off, the security deposit included, until you add one of them.

What changes for your guests

The moment you ask for money, you confirm the appointment. A booking at a deposit-taking venue arrives as To confirm instead of Booked, and it stays that way until you answer it.

It still holds the slot. That is deliberate: someone who has just sent money to your bank must not lose their time to the next guest while you are asleep. The hold is bounded by Hold an unconfirmed booking for in Setup — one hour to three days, 24 hours by default. When it runs out the slot is freed, the booking expires and the guest is told.

The guest sees “Waiting for the venue”, the time their hold runs to, and what is due. Their WhatsApp message says the booking is waiting on you and that they will hear from you here — it never tells them they are confirmed, because nobody has confirmed them.

The transfer rail, step by step

1. The guest books. The slot is held and the booking reads To confirm.
2. Their confirmation page shows what to transfer and where, exactly as you typed it, with an optional box for the reference their bank or app gave them.
3. They tap I’ve transferred. Their page now says they told you they sent it and that you will check it.
4. On Today, the booking’s money line reads guest says they sent it. It never reads “paid”. Qaema has no way of knowing whether a transfer happened, so it records two facts and nothing more: that the guest claimed it, and later that you confirmed or rejected it.
5. You tap Confirm. That single tap settles both things at once — the money arrived and the appointment is on. The booking becomes Booked, the money line reads paid, and the guest gets their ordinary booking message. You are never asked to confirm the same booking twice.

Reject does the opposite: the slot is freed and the guest is told. On the card rail, Confirm and Reject work the same way — the card is already charged at booking, but you still decide whether you can honour the time.

The card rail, step by step

1. The guest books. The slot is held and the booking reads To confirm.
2. Their confirmation page mounts your provider’s own card form, with your publishable key. The card details never reach Qaema.
3. When the charge succeeds their page says the payment went through and that you still have to confirm the booking — the money answering is not the same as the appointment being on.
4. On Today the money line reads paid, and you Confirm or Reject as above.

A card that does not go through says so plainly and tells the guest to contact you with their code, and to contact you too if their bank does show a charge. We do not promise them nothing was taken: the provider reports several outcomes that are not a completed charge, and the connection collapses them into one, so the honest answer is that the booking did not go through. A card that started and never finished holds the slot for a short grace period while we ask your provider what happened, then frees it — Today says which of the two happened, because “abandoned” and “declined” deserve different answers.

When money arrives that you cannot match

Reject the claim. The guest’s page then says you could not match their transfer and asks them to contact you with their code. If they transfer again and claim again, that is a fresh claim with its own pair of records, so nothing is overwritten.

Do not confirm a claim you have not actually seen in your account. A confirmation is a person asserting a fact the system cannot check, so it is recorded with your name against it — and it is never un-said. Money is corrected forward: a confirmation entered by mistake is answered with a rejection or a refund, each its own recorded act. There is no undo on the money tables.

When a card is captured after the booking has closed

It happens: a guest completes a 3-D Secure challenge minutes after their hold lapsed, or the provider’s answer arrives late. The charge is real and the booking is gone.

Today’s Deposits needing you strip shows it as “Card charged but not taken as a deposit — return it from your provider”. Qaema cannot send that money back — it was never ours and the connection is one-way, a charge only. Refund it in your own provider’s dashboard, then tap I returned it in Qaema so the record matches. The guest’s own page already tells them the money is with you, not with Qaema, and that you have been asked to return it.

The same strip carries the other three cases where you are holding money you cannot keep:

• a deposit that was paid on a booking you rejected or that lapsed;
• a deposit larger than the order it was finally spent against (see below);
• and, for context rather than action, cards that were abandoned or declined on bookings that have since closed.

On the transfer rail a refund is also manual: you send the money the way you received it, then record it. Qaema never implies it returned anything it never held.

Deposits at the register

When an order is started from a booking that carries a paid deposit, the register applies it: the cart shows the deposit line and the total actually comes down by that amount. The deposit is recorded as a prepayment, not a sale — it is on the fiscal invoice as a prepaid amount, it is in the accountant packet as a prepayment, and it is in neither the cash drawer’s expected total nor the terminal’s. It was collected before this shift opened.

A deposit never counts as paying the bill: it is part of what is owed, so the till still needs the rest collected properly before the order can be finalised — and if the deposit happens to be as large as the order, the register applies none of it rather than letting it close the sale on its own. A prepayment — the full-price basis above, where the guest paid for all of it up front — is the one kind that may leave nothing to collect, which is what it is for.

If the deposit is larger than the order came to, the register applies only what the order needed, and the difference shows on the Deposits needing you strip as money to return to the guest. A booking marked No-show keeps its deposit — that is what it was for.

If your plan lapses

Deposits belong to the Pro plan. If a plan falls below it, your booking page keeps working and guests keep booking; only the deposit goes away. The mode is reset to Off, nothing is quoted and nothing is charged. Turn it back on when the plan is back.