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Once you’ve connected a Stripe account, the Folio section of a reservation can take card payments as well as record them. The money goes straight to your own Stripe account. If you’d rather keep recording payments by hand, you can. Nothing here replaces Record payment, and a property that never turns card payments on works exactly as it did before.
  1. Open the reservation from the Calendar and find the Folio section.
  2. Tap Collect payment.
  3. Pick an amount, or type your own:
    • Full balance: everything still owing on the stay.
    • 30% deposit: a starting point you can edit.
    • Tourist tax: the amount from the tourist tax calculation.
  4. Tap Create payment link, then Copy.
  5. Paste the link wherever you talk to the guest: your guest conversation, an email, or the channel’s own inbox.
The guest opens the link, pays on Stripe’s own page, and sees a confirmation. You never handle their card details.
A new line appears on the folio straight away marked pending. Once the guest completes the payment it becomes a paid line (or, for a hold, one marked on hold), usually within seconds. If they never pay, the line ends up marked failed so you can see the attempt rather than wondering whether you sent it.

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What the guest sees

The link opens Stripe’s own payment page under your property’s name. Afterwards they land on a short confirmation:
  • Payment received: noting the charge appears on their statement under your property’s name.
  • Your card is holding this amount: for a hold, spelling out that no money has left their account and that their bank may show it as pending.
  • Payment not completed: if they backed out, telling them they haven’t been charged and to use the link again or ask you for a new one.
The page shows nothing about the booking or the folio, so it’s safe to send to anyone paying on the guest’s behalf. A guest signed in to their own stay page sees Your bill: the folio’s charges, the tourist tax, every payment you’ve recorded, and what’s left to pay. If you’ve turned card payments on, they get a Pay button for the balance and can settle it themselves, before checkout, without asking you for anything. It’s the same folio either way, so a payment they make lands on it exactly as one from a link you sent. Check the balance before you send a link: they may have already paid it. The bill stays on their stay page after they check out, as their receipt.
Guests see your line descriptions exactly as you typed them. The folio was host-only until now, so check what’s on older bookings before you point a guest at it: a line you wrote as a note to your colleague is now something the guest reads on their own bill.
Guests only see the bill once there’s something on the folio to show, and the Pay button only appears when there’s a balance owing and your Stripe account can take the payment. A guest never types an amount: whatever they pay is worked out from the folio at the moment they tap.

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Bookings from a channel

A booking that comes in from a channel arrives with its room already on the folio, as a Room rate line marked From channel, and with the breakfast the channel sold alongside it. Where the channel took the guest’s money, a Collected by channel payment sits against those lines, so the balance shows only what is genuinely still owed at the desk. On Booking.com’s usual arrangement, where the property collects on arrival, the full amount stands. The channel keeps those lines up to date, so they can’t be edited or removed here. Anything you agree with the guest yourself is a line of your own beside them, added with Add charge: a late checkout, an upgrade, or a discount entered as a negative amount. That is also the right way to knock money off, because a discount line lowers the tax base where deleting the room rate would pretend the stay was never sold. You only need the channel itself when the booking changes, a different room or an extra night. Change it there and the new figures sync back in. The sheet still warns you on a booking from Booking.com, Airbnb, or Vrbo that the channel has usually collected the room rate. You can still collect (for damage, a late checkout, or anything the guest asked for at the desk), but check the balance first, because charging the room rate again would bill them twice.

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Deposits: charge or hold

How deposits work is set once per property, on the Card payments screen under Integrations in your property settings (an Owner sets this):
  • Charge it: the money is taken now and lands in your Stripe account. Giving it back is a refund.
  • Hold it on the card: the amount is reserved on the guest’s card without being taken. You capture what you need or release the rest.
Balances are always charged, whichever you pick. If the stay runs past the hold’s 7 days, the sheet says so before you create the link. It names the date the card will be released and points you at Charge it instead. You can still send the hold; it just won’t cover you until checkout.

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Capture or release a hold

A held deposit shows on the folio marked on hold, with two buttons:
  • Capture: take the money. Use this when there’s damage or an unpaid extra.
  • Release: let it go. The reservation is settled and the guest owes nothing.
A hold doesn’t count towards what the guest has paid, because the money hasn’t moved. It only affects the balance once you capture it. There’s nothing to refund on a hold you released or that expired: the guest was never charged, so there’s no payment to reverse. Their bank may still show the amount as pending for a few days afterwards; that’s the card issuer clearing it on its own schedule, not a charge sitting on your account. If a guest asks, the money is already theirs to spend.
Card holds expire after about 7 days. That’s the card networks’ limit, not ours. If a hold lapses before you capture it, the line is marked hold expired and we let you know. The guest’s card is free at that point, so you’d need to send a new hold if you still want cover. For long stays, or when you need cover well after checkout, Charge it is the more reliable choice.
When a hold lapses you get a notification titled A security hold expired. Tapping it opens the reservation, so you can send a new hold without hunting for the booking. It follows your Reservation notifications setting. See Notification settings.

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Refund a payment

A payment collected by card shows a Refund button. Tap it to send the money back from your Stripe account; a matching refund line appears on the folio. Refunds you issue in your own Stripe dashboard show up here too. Only a captured card payment can be refunded, because only that money actually left the guest’s account. A hold shows Capture and Release instead, and once it has been released or has expired it shows neither: there is no charge to reverse. Payments you recorded by hand (cash, a bank transfer, a voucher) have no Refund button, because no card payment exists to reverse. Delete or edit those lines directly instead.
Lines collected by card can’t be deleted from the folio: a captured one is refunded instead, and a failed, released or expired one stays as the record of what was attempted. The folio is the record of what genuinely happened, so removing a line would leave your books disagreeing with your Stripe account. A Room rate line marked From channel can’t be deleted either: the channel rewrites it whenever the booking changes, so an edit here would only last until the next update.