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Two separate things decide what happens with money:
  • The payment policy on the experience — when the guest is meant to pay.
  • The payment state on each reservation — where that particular reservation actually stands.

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Payment policies

Set it in the experience editor’s Pricing card — choosing Yes reveals “When is it charged?” right beneath the price. Free-to-book experiences have nothing to collect, so the question doesn’t appear — “free” is the No — free to book answer, not an option in this list. The two can’t contradict each other. The three “charged automatically” / “charged when closing out” options appear only where charge-later payments are switched on for your shop. Recommendation: use At booking for anything priced, and No — free to book for restaurant-style reservations where guests pay for what they order. The charged-later options are for the case where you want a card on file but don’t want to hold the guest’s money for weeks. At the visit is the one for a tasting room where the fee usually ends up on the same bill as the bottles: the card is the safety net, the register is the normal way to settle.

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Charging later: what to know before you choose it

The two “charged automatically” options save the guest’s card at checkout and let Riserva take the money at the moment you chose. They change a few things about how guests can book and pay, so read this before switching an experience over. It applies when you save. Change the policy in the Pricing card and press Save: Riserva sets the pay-later option up on your Shopify product right then. You don’t have to un-publish and re-publish. Switching back to At booking removes it again, just as immediately. Online reservations only. Cards can only be saved through your storefront’s own checkout. Reservations your team takes by phone, in the admin, or at the register can’t save a card, so on a priced experience they sit as Payment due and you collect with a payment link, at the register, or by marking them paid on-site. Guests get fewer ways to pay. Shopify narrows the payment methods on a cart that saves a card: Shop Pay, Apple Pay and local payment methods don’t appear — the guest pays by card. That is Shopify’s rule for every saved-card checkout, not Riserva’s, and it applies to the whole cart, so it’s worth weighing against how your guests actually check out. The guest is told, twice. The booking window spells out when the card will be charged, and the charge date also rides the cart as the option’s name — “Billed 48 hours before your visit”, “Billed when you check in”, or “Billed at the end of your visit”. The wording follows the hours you set, so change the lead time and the next guest sees the new sentence. Add-ons are charged on the same date. Every add-on on the experience joins the same pay-later option, so one checkout has one charge date — a cheese plate never gets charged today for a visit you’re collecting for next month. See What guests see. A charge can fail. A saved card is not a hold: it can expire, be revoked or be declined when the time comes. When that happens the reservation turns into Payment due with the reason on the Payment card, and you collect it the usual three ways. Collection runs hourly, so we promise an hour and not a minute. Riserva checks for due balances once an hour, which means a charge due at 2:00 lands somewhere in the following hour. Every screen says it that way — “Charges $150.00 from Sun, Sep 20, 2026, 2:00 PM · collected within the hour” — and once the moment has passed the line reads “at the next collection run — queued” rather than showing you a time in the past. Each line ends with the saved card, such as “Visa •••• 4242 (exp 04/28)”. The Shopify order tells you the same thing. A saved-card order shows as Payment pending in Shopify and says nothing about the card, so Riserva adds two notes to it:
  • Riserva billing — “Saved card is charged from Sun, Sep 20, 2026 at 9:00 AM EDT (within the hour)”, “Saved card is charged when the party checks in”, or, under At the visit, “Saved card is charged when the visit is closed out (or it is settled at the register)”.
  • Riserva reservation — a link straight to the reservation in Riserva.
Anything else already on the order is left alone, and if the guest reschedules, the billing note is rewritten to the new date — the order never shows a promise that has moved. These orders close when the party arrives. Because a reservation is “delivered” on the day of the visit rather than shipped, Shopify would otherwise hold the order’s lines with an “Unknown delivery date” label for ever. Riserva lifts that as soon as the order is created (so it reads Unfulfilled, like any ordinary order) and marks it Fulfilled when you check the party in, from the admin or the register alike — except under At the visit, where the order is not fulfilled while the fee is still waiting on the card. The guest is not emailed about fulfilment; their reservation emails are the record. Reservations that were paid at checkout are untouched by all of this. Check-in is the latest the card is charged — except under At the visit, where the charge waits for close-out on purpose. For every other charge-later policy, a party that is checked in is being served, so a balance still waiting for its scheduled date is collected at the check-in, from the admin or the register alike. That covers the guest who booked tomorrow by mistake and turned up today: seat them if you can, check them in, and the charge follows. It does not move their reservation to today; if the seat matters, move it from the reservation’s edit page first. And if you want the money before the visit for any other reason, the reservation page’s Charge now button collects the balance on the spot. Bookings made inside the window. Under the charge lead, open Advanced — its choice is titled “Bookings made inside the 48-hour window” (your own lead in place of 48) — to choose what happens when a guest books less than that many hours before the visit. (The setting hides under Advanced because most wineries never need to change it — and it opens by itself whenever you’ve set it to anything other than the default, so a choice that changes billing never goes quiet on you.)
  • Charge at checkout (default) — there is nothing “later” about a visit that is already inside the window, so the guest simply pays now, with every payment method your checkout offers, and the reservation is confirmed on the spot.
  • Charge on the usual schedule — the guest’s card is saved at checkout and charged at the next collection, exactly like every other reservation. Pick this if you want one billing flow for everything.
Either way the guest is told at the fine print which one applies.

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At the visit: the register settles it, the card is the safety net

Pick At the visit — charged when closing out, or settled at the register when the entry fee normally ends up on the same bill as the wine. Here is the whole life of such a reservation:
  1. At checkout the guest’s card is saved and nothing is charged. The widget says so: “Nothing is charged today. Your card is saved and charged $X at the end of your visit. The entry fee can be settled at the counter instead.” The confirmation email repeats it, and the reservation’s Payment card reads Card on file.
  2. At check-in nothing happens to the money. Seat the party.
  3. At the register, when the party buys something and the guest is on the sale, the Bill credits tile lights up with the party’s open entry fee under Entry fees today and two choices: Add $X fee to sale (the fee becomes a line on the register sale, and when the sale completes the reservation reads Paid — the saved card is never charged) or Waive fee (the fee is forgiven, recorded on the reservation’s timeline, and the card is never charged).
  4. At close-out — the host’s Complete button, POS’s Complete, or the visit ending by itself — a fee still on the card is scheduled to be charged 15 minutes later, by the hourly collection. The Payment card reads Charge scheduled with the time; the register can still settle or waive the fee during those minutes, and Charge now on the reservation page takes it sooner when you know the till did not.
Things to know:
  • It never charges twice. The 15-minute wait exists because a register sale reaches Riserva from Shopify a little after the tender; a fee settled at the register or waived in that window is taken off the card before the collection runs, and the timeline reads “Saved card will not be charged”. The Shopify order the checkout created is then cancelled — straight away, or by the next hourly collection. If a register sale for the fee arrives after the card was charged (say, half an hour after close-out), the timeline says so with the amount — “Register sale … paid $X AFTER the saved card was charged — refund one of them” — and you refund one of the two in Shopify.
  • Add-ons ride the saved card too. A cheese plate or bottle added online is charged with the fee at close-out. If the register settles the fee, or you waive it, Riserva takes just the fee line off the guest’s checkout order, and at close-out the card is charged for the add-ons alone. The order’s Riserva billing note says so. If Shopify ever refuses to take the fee line off, the card is not charged and the reservation shows Payment due for the add-ons. The register doesn’t offer them as a fee: collect them with a payment link or Mark paid on-site, and Riserva then closes the guest’s checkout order so nothing can be collected on it twice. If Riserva later manages to take the fee line off, the add-ons go back to the saved card automatically.
  • No bill credit under this option. “Credit the fee toward the guest’s bill” does not appear here: the fee meets the bill at the register itself, and the waive rule below is how “fee waived with a purchase” works.
  • A fee discounted at checkout (a member or automatic discount) is owed at the discounted amount. The register cannot ring that as whole tasting units, so the tile shows it as “Collected on the saved card” with Waive fee as the only button; the card collects it at close-out.
  • Waiving can be suggested by a rule. In Settings → Policies → Entry fees at the register, set an amount; when the rest of the register sale is over it, the tile puts Waive fee first. An experience can set its own amount under the same Pricing option (Waive the fee when the rest of the sale is over). Staff still choose on every sale — the rule only picks the default — and the timeline says whether a waive followed the rule.
  • The reservation page can waive too. While the fee is on the card, the Payment card’s charge notice carries Charge now and Waive fee.
What this option is not: it does not put the party’s wine on the reservation’s order. The register sale is its own Shopify order; the reservation’s order holds the entry fee and nothing else.
If a pay-later option shows up on a product page Attaching the option to a product doesn’t put anything on your storefront — themes don’t display purchase options on their own. Two things can surface it anyway: another app that shows purchase options (a subscriptions or pre-order app with its own widget), and adding those products to the Shop sales channel, which renders purchase options itself. If a “Billed before your visit” choice appears somewhere you didn’t put it, that’s where it’s coming from — tell us and we’ll help you sort it out. What we’ve actually seen: a theme with a built-in plan picker showed a lone “One-time Purchase” radio under the price on a reservation product — the picker appears whenever a product has any purchase option, and it didn’t recognise ours, so it listed nothing else. It’s harmless (the booking button ignores it) but confusing. The no-code fix: theme editor → the Product information section → Custom CSS → paste product-subscriptions { display: none; } (adjust the selector to whatever element the picker renders — inspect the page). If the section has no Custom CSS field, the same rule goes in the theme’s base.css. Riserva labels its purchase options as its own, so a subscription widget that checks can tell them apart from its own.

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Payment states you’ll see on a reservation

The two you’ll live with are Paid and Payment due. Charge-later experiences add four more:

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”Payment due” — the state that matters most

Every reservation your team takes by phone or for a walk-in on a priced experience starts as Payment due. Riserva doesn’t pretend a phone reservation was paid, and it doesn’t ask you to take a card over the phone. You have three ways to resolve it, all on the reservation’s Payment card: 1. Create a payment link. Riserva mints a Shopify invoice for the right amount. You can Copy payment link and text it, Open it, or Email invoice to the guest if you have their address. When they pay, the order attaches to the reservation and the state flips to Paid. 2. Mark paid on-site. They paid at the counter, on your POS, in cash. The reservation records that it’s settled. 3. Waive payment. Comped, goodwill, a mistake. The whole outstanding balance is forgiven — there is no partial waive; to charge a reduced amount, collect through the register (discounts settle at what you actually charged) or shrink the party before collecting. Any open payment link is voided automatically before a mark-paid or a waive, so a guest can’t pay an invoice for a reservation you already settled.
Good to know Riserva lets you collect money after the visit too. A completed or no-showed reservation can still take a payment link — that’s how post-service collection and no-show follow-ups work.

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Balances from adding guests

If a paid party grows, the added guests create a balance at the experience’s list price, and the reservation reads Partially paid (the Payment due state, since part was already paid) with a line reading “$150 due for guests added after payment”. You collect that the same three ways — the payment card offers Create payment link for the balance. See Edit a reservation.

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The Pricing card: charged or free

The experience editor’s Pricing card asks one question: “Are you charging for entry?”
  • Yes — guests pay a fee to reserve. Set the price (per guest — or one price for the whole venue on a buyout) and, optionally, credit that fee toward the guest’s bill.
  • No — free to book. Nothing else to set. Guests pay for what they buy during the visit.
Choosing “No” clears the price — a free experience never carries a hidden fee that staff tools could accidentally collect.

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The fee toward the bill

Under “Yes” there’s a checkbox: Credit the fee toward the guest’s bill. This is the classic winery mechanic — the 50tastingfeecomesoffwhattheyspendonwine.Riservatracksthecreditonthereservation("Feecredittowardbill:50 tasting fee comes off what they spend on wine. Riserva tracks the credit on the reservation ("Fee credit toward bill: 50.00”) and reports on outstanding credits. At the register, staff see the credit on the party’s row (a Credit X∗∗badgeonthePOStileandinthehostview)andapplyitwithonetap—∗∗ApplyX** badge on the POS tile and in the host view) and apply it with one tap — **Apply X credit to sale on the POS detail page (or the Bill credits tile) adds a matching discount to the register cart. The credit is spent when that sale completes, not at the tap — the timeline records both steps, and a cleared cart or abandoned sale leaves the credit on the reservation. It is spent once; the reservation page shows the remaining credit either way.

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Where money lives

Every reservation that took money lists its Shopify order (or orders — an added guests balance creates a second one) on the Payment card, with a link straight into Shopify admin. Riserva never becomes a second ledger; Shopify holds the money, Riserva holds the reservation.
What things mean on this screen: What things mean: Experiences