Checkout Rules

A Checkout Rule applies itself. Cash discount, card surcharge, Wednesday special, second-piercing deal, $13 tattoos on Friday the 13th — you describe when it applies and what it does, and the register does the remembering. The hand-picked kind is a Discount preset; rules are for the deals that shouldn’t depend on the front desk’s memory.

Rules live at Settings → Sales & Payments → Checkout Rules (managed with Sales Settings → Manage). Every rule is either a Discount or a Surcharge, and applies one of two ways:

• Each matching item — lands on every line that fits the rule’s scope. “Every piercing 15% off on Wednesdays.”
• The whole cart, when paid a certain way — lands once, based on the payment method. “5% off for cash”, “3% card fee.”

Conditions

Skip any condition to ignore it; fill several and all must hold. The scope side: service categories, specific service types, artists. The calendar side: day of week, day of month, month, a date range, a time window (which can cross midnight — a 20:00–02:00 window belongs to the night it opened). Friday the 13th is just day-of-week Friday plus day-of-month 13, standing forever. Customer age bounds handle minor fees and senior deals — an age condition only fires when the sale has a customer with a birthdate on file.

Quantity conditions build multi-item deals: a minimum item count, and Start from item for BOGO shapes — start at 2 and the first matching item stays full price. A line with quantity 3 counts as 3 items. Subtotal bounds make small-cart fees and big-cart rewards possible (“$1 card fee under $20”), counted against the items in the rule’s scope, not the whole cart.

Three things rules deliberately can’t see: gift card and deposit lines (never discounted, never surcharged — that money is spoken for), services with their own quantity pricing, which already include their volume discount and aren’t discounted again by volume rules, and manually discounted lines, which sit out volume rules — they count toward the sequence but don’t get discounted again.

What it does

Three amount shapes, one per rule:

• Percent — off (or onto) each matching item’s price.
• Flat amount — per matching item.
• Fixed price — a floor: matching items above it drop to it, anything already cheaper is unchanged. The $13-tattoo shape. Discount rules only.

An optional per-line cap keeps percentage rules civilized on high-ticket work, and a discount can never push a line below zero.

For discounts, you pick who absorbs it: the artist (commission figured on the discounted total) or the studio (artist earns on full price, the house eats the difference). For per-item surcharges, you pick who earns it: the studio keeps it, or it joins the artist’s commission alongside the service. A payment-method surcharge follows the artists on the rule instead — pick artists and the fee routes to them as commission, pick none and the studio keeps it, the usual shape for card fees.

When rules compete

One discount and one surcharge can each land on a line, but two discounts never stack on the same line — the winner is decided by priority (Normal, High, Highest), then by specificity: at equal priority, “Cash on piercings” beats “Cash on anything.” A per-item discount and a payment-method discount aren’t competing — both can apply to the same sale: if you advertise both, you charge both.

Against a manual discount on the same line, the larger amount wins; a rule replaces your hand-picked discount only when it gives the customer strictly more.

Payment-method discounts and surcharges follow different rules: a tender discount applies only when one payment covers the whole balance (splitting the bill forfeits it), while a tender surcharge applies to every qualifying payment. And when a connected card processor is charging the card, the processor’s own surcharge applies and your rule stands down — the card is never surcharged twice.

Everything is judged at the moment the sale started, studio-local — a happy-hour cart that crosses into 6:01 keeps its deal.

At the register

An applied rule shows on the line by name with its amount, and the printed and web receipts carry the same name. Payment-method rules show on the tender choices before anyone commits — each method’s tile carries the deal or the fee it would trigger. A rule can be waived per line by removing its discount; it stays off that line even as the cart recalculates.

Testing and retiring

Test rules builds a hypothetical cart — items, payment method, customer age, even a simulated date and time — and shows which rules fire and what they’d do, without touching a real sale. Use it on any date-shaped rule before its date arrives.

Pausing a rule (the active toggle) stops it immediately. A discount rule that has ever applied to a sale can’t be deleted — deactivate it instead; history keeps its snapshot either way, so old receipts still show the rule’s name and amount. The editor also refuses a second active rule with the same scope and timing. What counts as a difference is the rule’s conditions — services, artists, payment methods, days, dates, times, customer age, item count — not its amounts or subtotal bounds. Two card-fee rules split only by cart size are refused as duplicates; give them some other distinguishing condition, or make them one rule.