Online Payment Processing: How it Improves Efficiency and Profitability for Your Venue

As an event manager for any hospitality group, restaurant, or venue, there is so much to do to organize financials for private events – including collecting deposits, sending client receipts, reconciling event financials with a controller or accounting team, and processing final payments. The transactional component of running events is challenging, especially if your venue still operates in the Stone Age of manual credit card authorization forms.

If you would like not only to increase your efficiency in managing event payments but also see significant profitability for your business, online payment processing is the way to go.  Here’s a list of the top reasons why streamlining your event payment processing will benefit your ability to help your venue prosper.

1. Your Clients Expect Online Payment Processing

Providing clients with an easy way to pay is expected nowadays for all transactions. From booking a hotel room to purchasing weekly groceries or ordering dinner, today’s consumers expect the ability to purchase products and services online. Why should a deposit for an event be any different? Below are some stats that help demonstrate the growing importance of online payments. 

• 43 percent of consumers in the United States said in 2023 they would prefer to shop mostly online rather than in-store.
• Nearly one-fourth of all retail commerce is predicted to happen online by 2026 when ecommerce sales reach $8.1 trillion worldwide.
• 70% of consumers prefer digital payments that are fast, convenient and secure.

2. Online Transactions Ensures Your Clients’ Safety and Security

Most businesses can agree that they want their customers to feel as if their data is safe and secure. How would you feel if you were shopping at a store, and a cashier wrote down your credit card information and began walking around the store with it in hand? This sounds crazy, but it sadly takes place daily in restaurants across the US.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) mandates that businesses remain PCI compliant and obtain an annual certificate agreeing to a list of requirements. Here are a few:

• Protect stored cardholder data
• Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks
• Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know
• Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access
• Restrict physical access to cardholder data

The last thing your business should want is for credit card information to be written down or printed and get into the wrong hands. Aside from the obvious issue of fraudulent charges, your business could also be blasted on social media or by word of mouth for not protecting personal data. Would this be worth the stain on your business’ reputation?

3. Improve Efficiency with Digital Payment Processing

If your business is using a credit card authorization form, you’re likely to manually process the charges in a separate Point of Sale (POS). This means you need to print the receipt that then needs to be scanned and digitally sent to the client.

Managing payments in this manner can take substantial time each day to run the new deposits, scan the receipts, send the receipts to the client and accounting team, and manually log the payment in Tripleseat, your event management platform. Leading up to the holiday season, it might take event managers like you multiple hours due to the volume of events. All of this doesn’t necessarily take into account if the information on the authorization form was illegible, written down incorrectly, or if the card was declined. These problems then require follow up with the client.

Moving to online payments takes this tedious work off your plate. The process of submitting the card conveniently to all falls on the client. They automatically receive a digital receipt upon payment. If a card is declined or input incorrectly, the charge will fail and Tripleseat will send an email alert to the person trying to pay.

Not having to perform these menial tasks frees up time to focus on more important things, such as prospecting and entertaining new clients, upselling existing events, and improving BEO communication to the chef and operations team. This all helps improve the quality of events and contributes to your company’s bottom line. More time = more event revenue. 

4. Avoid Hurdles to the Booking Process

In the many consumer and planner surveys Tripleseat has performed, we hear time and again that they often book with the event manager who is most responsive and makes the process easy. Credit card authorization forms that need to be printed and returned add unnecessary hurdles. Many social clients may not have an at-home printer or scanner. Less tech-savvy clients may not understand that they can take a photo of the form with their mobile device. Others may not feel comfortable sending their credit card information via email for fear of data safety concerns (there’s that PCI compliance again), and fax machines are nearly obsolete.

Event clients often say, “Why does this seem so difficult? Can’t I simply pay online?” The answer should be yes. Simplifying the payment process for clients increases repeat business and eliminates unnecessary follow-up if a client signed the contract but didn’t pay because they were “waiting to get to a printer or scanner.”

5. Avoids Discrepancies and Incorrect Charges to Maintain Reputation

The truth is, mistakes happen. Event transactions can be incorrectly charged in the venue POS at the conclusion of the event. Many times, the client might fail to meet the minimum, and that wasn’t charged. Perhaps the party had additional guests arrive who were not added to the final bill. Or, maybe the client was VIP and was meant to receive a discount that was never applied.

Each of these scenarios falla on event manager shoulders to communicate the error to the client and the venue’s controller. Then event managers have to find a way to adjust the final sale in the POS. These errors certainly don’t help with the reputation of your venue.

However, using online payments in Tripleseat allows the client’s card to be stored for future charges. Your team can implement a standard operating procedure of closing the POS final bill to a “house account” named Tripleseat. The operations team can send the final check to you, the event manager, at the close of business for review. If there were any errors to the check, communications are easy in Tripleseat to the accounting and ops team to change in the POS. You can then make the final adjusted charge to the card that was stored in Tripleseat. This means there are fewer refunds and adjustments to actual credit card charges. This process is a lifesaver and avoided those annoying and unnecessary client conversations.

How to Convince Your Team to Use Online Payment Processing

Now that you understand the ways in which online payments can improve your business, how do you convince your team to move forward? One of the biggest concerns about online payment processing is that the processing fees might be slightly higher than traditional brick and mortar merchant fees. Here are three talking points to help address these concerns.

1. Compare the standard Tripleseat merchant fees to “card not present” transactions in your POS. With an online purchase, this is the category of charge that is applied, which is typically a higher rate than if a guest presents a physical card.
2. Discuss with your controller or CFO if you could implement an event fee or increase your base menu price to help cover the difference in cost. 
3. Be sure to discuss the amount of time you will save, which will allow more time to book more events and ultimately increase revenue.

Secure your Online Payments with Tripleseat

Tripleseat offers simple, safe, and effective online payment integrations with the top trusted payment processing solutions. Get paid faster when you start accepting credit cards today. Learn more about these options by visiting Tripleseat Online Payments.