RELEASE 6-3-2020 @4:30AM PDT-Secure Payment Link, UI/UX Improvements

General Release Information

This release contains a major update for Party Center Pay customers. We have added the ability for guests to pay for a party's deposit or entire balance through the new Secure Payment Link feature. 

This release also contains a few small bug fixes and UI/UX improvements.

Secure Payment Link

This new feature allows your guests to make a payment for their party through a secure link. It is free to use, but can only work with Party Center Pay. Thus, it is only available for Party Center Pay customers. If this feature is enabled, the invoice that is emailed to the guest will contain the link that allows the guest to make a payment.

Please contact support to have this feature enabled for your facility.

How It Works

Once you have contacted support to have the feature enabled, a new Make Payment button will automatically appear on the emailed version of the invoice for a party order if the order is in Open or Pending Review status and if the order has a balance greater than $0.00:

If the balance due is $0.00, the payment link will no longer be accessible and the guest will not be able to make further payments on a party order. If the balance was previously $0.00, but was changed to be greater than $0.00, the guest will once again be able to use the payment link to make a payment on the order. 

The customer will be directed to the Secure Payment Link page for their party after clicking on the Make Payment button. This page allows the customer to enter their credit card information and make a payment for their party order:

The Complete Payment button cannot be used until the guest has entered their credit card information. Once the guest has entered their card information, the button will turn green and become clickable:

If the party requires a specific deposit amount to be paid, the customer will have the option to either pay that amount or pay the full amount of the party:

If the deposit has already been paid, the only option will be to pay the remaining balance.
If the deposit is the same as the full party price or there is no deposit required, the only option will be to pay the full balance.

Adding a Tip

If the guest is making the final payment, they will have the option to add a tip to the party:


If a tip has already been added to the party, the guest can still choose to add an additional tip. Parties that have an automatic gratuity will still allow for a customer to leave an additional tip as well:

Once the payment has been completed, the guest will be directed to the following page:

The guest will receive an updated copy of the invoice, confirming their payment.

Email Settings

You may change the subject of the payment confirmation email by going to Admin > Facility Text and Labels > Online Booking and changing the Payment Email Subject text:

If you wish for an email address (or multiple) to be notified when a payment is made through the payment link, you can add email addresses to a new field under Admin > Online Booking Settings.
Any email addresses entered in the Email Addresses Notified When Payment Link Used field will receive a copy of the payment confirmation email:

Reporting

You may want to track the balance of your party orders to determine which customers have paid and which have not. One of our legacy reports can assist with this process. Go to Admin > Reports and locate the Other Financial Reports section.
Click on the Invoice Balance Report:

You will be presented with several filter options. You may choose to search by either the order date, or the date of the party itself (Event Date). You may also select which type of order to search by. To search all parties, select Events and Online Booking:

NOTE: This is a legacy report, and thus uses our old verbiage. Events is equivalent to In House Party orders, and Online Booking is equivalent to Online Booking Party Orders. 

In the following example, the facility can see that these two in house party orders have not received any payments:

In this next example we can see that these online booking party orders have both received payments of $100. If a facility requires a deposit to book a specific party, all instances of that party booked online will at least have the deposit paid:

Bug Fixes and UI/UX Improvements

In addition to the Secure Payment Link, the following customer-facing bug fixes and UI/UX improvements are also included in this release.

DEV-2780 - Party Statistics Total Average columns are summing all averages instead of averaging them

The Party Statistics Report contains a row for totals. This row displays the sum of all averages for each average column:

The general expectation, however, is that is that the average columns should instead display the average of all rows in the Totals row.
The Totals row of the Party Statistics report has been updated to meet this expectation:

DEV-2784 - Add Facility ID to header

The upper right-hand side of the screen that displays when logged in to Party Center Software will now display your Facility Id for convenience. You may be asked for this number when calling our support line, so we have made it more accessible:

DEV-2613 - Insufficient Permission when Point of Sale is set as Home Page

Users have the ability to change the page they land on when logging in to Party Center Software by going to Admin > Users and clicking on their account. The page can be changed by altering the Home Page settings:

It is possible to set the home page to the Point of Sale:

A bug was causing users to land on a page telling them that they had insufficient permissions and could not access the Point of Sale if the POS was set as the home page. This has been resolved.

DEV-2773 - Making a final payment with Party Center Pay forces the order into closed status

If a payment was made on an order through a Party Center Pay method (Hosted Credit, EMV Credit, or Debit) that brought the order's balance to $0.00, the order status was automatically changed to Closed.

This unintended functionality was a bug and was inconsistent with other payment methods. It has now been fixed, and making a final payment through Party Center Pay will not alter the order's status.

DEV-2779 - Remove Emails tab from Facility Text and Labels

Facility Text and labels contained an Emails tab that was no longer in use by any part of the software:

This tab has been removed to prevent any confusion.

DEV-2816 - Record Only - Credit and Debit payment methods auto-populate commas into the dollar amount

When using using the Record Only payment method to record a payment, the Amount field populates with the dollar amount due on the order. If the amount due was $1000.00 or greater, field was inserting a comma into the amount:

When the user attempted to submit the payment, it was being rejected for containing commas.

The automatic commas have been removed and will no longer populate in the field if the amount is $1000.00 or greater.

DEV-2849 - Add category filter to Orders by Product and Orders by Discount or Coupon reports

The Orders by Product and Orders by Discount or Coupon reports have both received an additional filter allowing the user to filter by the Product Category:

This allows those reports to replace the functionality of the old Cash Analysis report. Filtering by category can take the place of the old Tag Sets which essentially accomplished the same task.

The new filter can be found alongside the rest on both reports:

NOTE: When using the Orders by Coupon or Discount report, the Product Category filter can only apply to Coupons. This is because Discounts are not a product type within Party Center Software, and thus do not have a Product Category.

Using the filter will cause the reports to only display result for products that are in the category(or categories) selected: