STRUCTAA sale, the check, and the end of the day
Ring a sale, split a check by the lines on it, take a tip, add sales tax, print the bill, and close the day with a report that adds up. A guest can settle from their own phone, into your own Stripe account. Keep the card machine you already have.
Free — every module, no card. You pay only for the AI you use.
A sale, in one form
Whatever the register records, it records once — for the drawer, for the client’s history, for the person who earned it, and for the tax you owe.
The basket
Tap what you sold from your own list — a ninety-minute massage, a brake job, a case of twelve — or type a line and an amount when it isn’t on the list. Either way it lands as one sale.
Whose sale it is
Name the client and the sale joins their record and their lifetime spend. Pick who performed it and Reports credits that person by name.
Cash or card
The tender is captured at the one moment anybody knows it. Sales tax is computed on the server from your rate, so a tablet left open on a stale page cannot charge the wrong tax.
Today, as it happens
The day’s sales sit under the form, newest first. A sale rung on the register at the other end of the room appears here without anyone pressing refresh.
What the guest owes, line by line
A check is opened, added to through the shift, and settled. This is the order the money is worked out in. The screen previews it; the server computes what is actually charged.
- Items
- Each line at its price, times how many.
- + Service charge
- A percent you set once for the business, anywhere from none to thirty.
- − Discount
- A whole percent, and it will not save without a reason — the screen offers regular guest, kitchen mistake, comp, or other.
- + Sales tax
- Your rate, in hundredths of a percent, on what is left after the discount.
- = Total
- What the check owes. This is the number that prints.
- + Tip
- On top of the check. A tip never counts toward covering what is owed.
- = Charged
- What the guest hands over, and what the drawer expects to hold.
Split it evenly between guests, or by the items each guest picked. Every part is a real payment with its own tender, so “those two on card, the rest cash” is two rows in your books — and each part carries its own share of the service charge and of the tax, to the cent.
Print the bill before or after it is paid: your name at the top, the lines, the service charge, the discount with its percent, the tax with its rate, the total, the tip, and what was charged.
A check closed while the connection is down waits on the device and lands on the business day the cash actually moved. A sale rung straight at the register, with no check behind it, needs the network.
A split check carries no discount — a discounted check settles in one go.
Day close, and the Z-report
One panel to read, one sheet to print for the office drawer. It is the same arithmetic Reports uses, so the two never disagree.
- Cash, card, phone and gift-card redemptions, each with its count, adding up to the day’s revenue.
- Expected cash in the drawer: cash sales, plus the gift cards people bought with cash.
- Tips, split cash / card / phone — so a tip-out done off the paper is not short.
- Sales tax collected, which Reports then totals over a filing period.
- Every voided payment, struck through, with the manager who voided it and at what time.
- Checks closed without being paid, and the day’s best sellers.
Day close prints the day; it does not lock it. Locking a month so its books cannot change afterwards is a separate, deliberate act in Accounting. And expected cash holds no opening float — add yours.
Gift cards, and where that money sits
Sold at the same register as everything else, and counted the way an accountant would count them.
Sell one
An amount, cash or card, and a note for who it is for. A code comes back once — write it on the card.
Check a balance
Type the code: what is left on it, and whether the card is still live.
Redeem it
The code pays for the sale at the register. The balance is spent down under a lock, so two front desks cannot spend the last dollar twice.
Lost, or sold by mistake
Deactivate a card, reactivate it, or undo the sale outright — the card has to be unspent, and the money leaves the drawer again in the same step.
Selling a gift card is money in the drawer and not revenue: what you took is an obligation to serve somebody later. It becomes revenue when the card is spent. Day close says both — cards sold today as a note beneath expected cash, redemptions as a tender that put nothing in the drawer — so the same fifty dollars is never counted twice.
A card has to cover a whole sale: part gift card, part cash is not built. Redemption happens at the register rather than on an open check, and a code belongs to your business, not to a network.
The guest settles from their own phone
For the person who wants to leave now, and the front desk that would rather not be a queue.
Show the code
Open the check and show the QR. The guest scans it with their phone camera. Nothing to install, and the code opens that one check.
They read their own check
The live lines, the service charge, the tax, and what is still owed — under your name, your color and your logo, in your currency.
They tip and pay
A card, through Stripe. The check settles by the same arithmetic your own staff’s settle uses, and the screen they are watching turns to paid on its own.
Whose account, whose rates
- The charge goes to your own Stripe account. You connect it once on Stripe’s own pages, and Structa keeps the account id and whether it can take money — no bank detail, ever.
- Your business is the merchant on that charge: your name is what the guest reads on their card statement.
- The money is paid out to you from that account, and you watch it in Stripe’s own dashboard.
- Structa’s own fee is 0.35% of the check, set per business — and never any part of the tip, which passes through whole.
- Cash costs you nothing here. A card you ran on your own machine costs you nothing here either: those rates stay between you and whoever gave you the machine.
And the edges of it
- Cards only. A payment that settles hours later is no use to somebody standing in front of you waiting to go.
- A balance under Stripe’s smallest charge cannot clear on a phone; the last cents are settled at the register.
- A code opens one check and expires in hours. It is not a link to your business.
- Guest Pay settles a check. A booking is rung at the register.
Keep the card machine you have
Nothing here asks you to move your card processing. Run the card on the machine already on your counter and record the sale as a card payment: the tip, the sales tax and the person who performed it all go on the record, and Reports and Day close count it like any other money.
The Z-report keeps phone-paid money on a line of its own, apart from card. The card line is the one your machine batches, so the two still agree at the end of the night.
Voids, refunds, and the PIN in the way
A correction moves money, so each one is somebody’s decision with their name on it.
A void
The sale should never have existed. It stays on the record struck through, drops out of revenue, and prints on the Z-report with the name of whoever approved it.
A refund
The sale happened and money goes back, in part or in whole. The sale stays; revenue nets down; the tip and the tax inside it shrink by the same proportion, so the report still adds up.
The PIN
Nobody signs out of a shared tablet. So a void, a refund, a reopened check and a deactivated gift card each ask for a manager’s personal PIN, and the correction carries that manager’s name rather than the tablet’s. A manager already signed in is not asked. Five wrong tries in ten minutes locks it, and every try, right or wrong, is written down.
Reopening a paid check
You cannot quietly edit a settled check. Void its payment first; only then does it reopen, unpaid, for the lines on it to be corrected.
The trail
Created, voided, un-voided: every payment writes rows that nothing in the product can edit or delete, and only a manager can read.
Money you are holding and do not own
A guest can pay a check your staff already settled. That charge lands in your Stripe balance looking exactly like a real payment, and without something saying otherwise the business never learns it owes anybody anything. Structa writes it down — the amount, and the Stripe references a person needs to find it — and puts a card in front of a manager that does not go away until somebody decides: give it back, keep it, or it was never needed. One press refunds it, once, however many times it is pressed. Nothing is refunded automatically: handing money back is a decision that has to have a name on it.
What’s actually true today
Including the parts that are not built. You would find those in week one anyway.
- A sale is recorded with its tip, its sales tax, and the person who performed it.
- Sales tax is computed on the server from your rate, after any discount, and printed on the bill with the rate beside it.
- A discount will not save without a reason attached to it.
- A split check settles as real, separate payments, each with its own tender — and the parts add up to the check exactly.
- A split check cannot carry a discount, and a gift card has to cover a whole sale.
- Guest Pay charges run to your own Stripe account, under your own business name, and Structa’s fee is charged on the check and never on the tip.
- Cards on the machine you already own stay there, at your own rates, and every one of those sales is still recorded for your books.
- A gift card sold is not revenue until somebody spends it, and Day close shows both numbers so nothing is counted twice.
- Expected cash on the Z-report contains no opening float, and closing the day does not lock the books.
- Voids and refunds keep the record and carry the approving manager’s name; the payment event log cannot be edited by anyone.
- An overpaying guest is a case the product names out loud, and the money is never sent back without a person pressing the button.
- Your data is yours: a full export whenever you want one, and permanent deletion on request.
Questions about the money
Do I have to change card processors?
No. Keep the machine on your counter and the rates you have; record the sale as a card payment and it counts in Reports, in Day close and in your books like everything else. Guest Pay — the guest paying from their phone — is the one path where Structa creates the charge, and it creates it on your own Stripe account.
Whose Stripe account does a phone payment land in?
Yours. You connect your own account once through Stripe’s own onboarding, and the charge is made to it with your business as the merchant, so your name is what the guest reads on their statement. All Structa keeps is the account id and whether it can take money — no bank detail passes through us, and you watch the payouts in Stripe’s own dashboard.
What does Structa take out of a payment?
Nothing at all on cash, and nothing on a card you ran on your own machine. On a payment a guest makes from their phone, 0.35% of the check — and none of the tip, which is passed through whole.
Can two guests split one check?
Yes: evenly by head, or by the items each of them ordered, in any mix of cash and card. Each part is its own payment row with its own tender and its own tip, each carries its share of the service charge and the tax, and the check closes the moment the parts cover it exactly.
What stops somebody voiding their own mistake at the end of the shift?
A manager’s PIN, and the fact that a void is not a deletion. The voided sale stays on the record, prints on the Z-report with the approving manager’s name and the time, and writes a row in a payment log nothing in the product can edit. Wrong PINs are rate-limited and recorded too.
Do you handle sales tax?
Yes, as one rate per business in hundredths of a percent — 8.88% is stored as 888, because money math has no business using decimals. It is applied after the discount, printed on the bill with the rate, totalled on the Z-report, and summed over a month or a quarter in Reports so you know what to remit. Leave it at zero and no check ever mentions tax.
How do gift cards show up in the books?
A sale is deferred, not revenue — you have taken money for a service you still owe. The redemption is the revenue, and it puts nothing in the drawer. Day close prints both lines, and a mistaken sale can be undone as long as the card is unspent.
What happens if a guest pays twice?
The excess is written down as an exception the moment it happens, with the Stripe references needed to find the money, and a manager sees a card that stays until it is settled one way or another. Refunding is one press, and it cannot double-refund. It is never automatic.