Deposits & card holds

Sidedoor lets you protect a booking with a card hold - an authorisation on the guest’s card that you only turn into a real charge if you need to. This page explains the whole model so you know exactly what happens to a guest’s money at each step.

What the guest sees

Sidedoor uses the same wording for a card hold everywhere the guest encounters it (the booking widget, their account and confirmation emails) and never calls a hold a deposit:

Guest sees	Meaning
Minimum hold £X	At checkout, for a Hold policy. Nothing is charged; the hold is released on arrival.
Minimum hold, placed 3 days before	At checkout, for a Hold policy on a booking 3+ days out (see Advance bookings below).
Deposit £X	At checkout, for a Capture policy. Charged now and taken off the bill at the venue.
Payment: None needed	At checkout, when no deposit applies.
Held / Placed 3 days before / Released / Ended	On the booking after checkout - the live states of a Minimum hold.
Paid / Due / Refunded	On the booking after checkout - the live states of a Deposit.
No-show charge	On the booking, once a hold has been charged under your no-show or unconfirmed policy.

Deposit types

Deposits are set on a venue’s payment policies (Settings → Policies → General). Each policy’s Payment setting chooses how the deposit is taken:

Payment setting	What it does
Hold	Places a card hold on the guest for the minimum spend - authorised but not charged, then released or captured at the door. This is the default.
Capture	Charges the guest’s card for the minimum spend at checkout - the money moves straight away.

A booking with no payment policy attached takes no deposit.

Hold versus capture

The distinction at the heart of the model:

Hold (authorise) - the amount is reserved on the guest’s card. No money moves. The hold’s status is authorised and, on the reservations grid, the hold icon shows gold. This is the default behaviour.
Capture - you take some or all of the held amount. The money moves to you, the status becomes captured, and the hold icon turns green.
Release - you let the hold go without charging. The reservation is unaffected, the guest is never charged, and the hold icon turns grey.

Which of these applies is decided by the payment policy’s Payment setting (above): a Hold policy authorises the deposit and leaves it to you to capture or release at the door, while a Capture policy charges the minimum spend at checkout so it’s settled up front.

How the amount is worked out

For per-cover deposits, the amount comes from your price lists (Settings → Tables → Pricing), which are linked to your access rules. The deposit is calculated per cover as the price multiplied by the party size, respecting a minimum number of covers - so a small party is still held for a sensible minimum spend. Any attached bundle raises the deposit to the bundle’s total only if that’s higher than the per-cover minimum spend: the deposit is the greater of the two, not their sum. A £40 per-cover minimum with a £30 bundle still holds £40; a £50 bundle would raise it to £50.

On a Table access profile, the Optional add-ons and Pre-orders sections each have a Pay at venue toggle. When it’s on, the guest still selects those items but pays for them at the venue, so their cost is excluded from the hold (any deposit or minimum spend still applies). Event profiles have no such toggle, so event bundle costs always feed the deposit. See Bundles & add-ons.

The minimum for any hold is £0.50.

Authorising a hold

A hold can be attached when you create a reservation (+ Request deposit) or a guest-list booking, or sent afterwards as a payment request (below). The + Request deposit row is always there on the reservation form, even for a booking type that doesn’t normally carry one - pre-ticked with the minimum spend when one applies, or left blank for your team to set an amount by hand.

If Sidedoor already has the guest’s saved card, the hold is placed immediately (off-session).
If not, the guest completes a secure card form to authorise it (on-session).

Once authorised, no funds have left the guest’s account - the amount is simply held.

Advance bookings: a saved card, held closer to the visit

A card hold is a short-lived authorisation, so for a Hold policy on a booking made well ahead of time (72 hours or more before the visit) Sidedoor doesn’t place the hold at the moment of booking - it would expire long before the guest arrives. Instead:

The guest consents to saving their card when they book. If they enter a new card, they complete the secure card form (including any bank verification) up front, so nothing extra is needed nearer the time.
No money is touched and no hold is placed at this point - only the card is saved, with the guest’s permission.
Sidedoor then places the actual hold automatically, around 72 hours (3 days) before the booking, using the saved card. From that point it behaves exactly like any other hold: authorised, then captured or released at the door.
A device wallet (Apple Pay or Google Pay) can’t be used for this step, since a wallet payment can’t be charged again later without the guest present. The guest needs an actual card here; wallets work as normal for a hold or deposit placed within 72 hours.

For a booking made inside the 72-hour window, the hold is placed at booking as described above. This only applies to Hold policies - a Capture policy charges the minimum spend at checkout, so there’s no authorisation to expire.

If a hold expires before the visit

Banks only keep a card hold for about a week, so a hold placed well ahead of the visit can lapse before the guest arrives. When that happens and there’s no saved card to place a fresh one from, the booking stays live - it’s never auto-cancelled - and Sidedoor automatically re-requests it: the guest gets an email to add their card again 72 hours before the visit (timed so the new hold is still live when they arrive), with one reminder 24 hours before if they still haven’t. You can also send this yourself at any time with Re-request from the reservation’s deposit controls. Until it’s back in place, the reservation’s hold shows Expired - see the reservations grid for how that reads on a pill.

The Deposit tab

Open a reservation or guest-list booking and switch to its Deposit tab. Three figures across the top summarise every payment on the booking:

Figure	Meaning
Pending	Awaiting the guest, or a saved card waiting for its automatic hold (see Advance bookings above).
Held	Authorised but not yet charged.
Captured	Money actually taken.

Below that sits the Payment policy in force, a form for requesting money (see Requesting more below), and a Payments table - one row per payment the booking has had. Most bookings have a single row; a booking that’s grown also has a row for each top-up. Click any row to open that payment on its own: its status, the actions available, its Stripe payment reference, and a History of everything that’s happened to it.

Once a payment link is out, the tab also shows the venue’s deposit policy rule and the exact date and time the booking auto-cancels if the guest still hasn’t paid - see Deposit and confirmation policies.

Capturing at the door

When the guest arrives (or doesn’t), settle a payment from its row on the Deposit tab:

Open the booking, go to Deposit, and open the payment to settle.
Choose Capture to take what’s held. Capture always takes the full amount currently held - or up to a reduced limit, if you’ve set one (below) - in one go.
Or choose Release and enter an amount. Release the full hold to cancel it entirely: the reservation is unaffected and the guest is never charged. Release less than the full amount to reduce the deposit instead - the hold stays live, but any later capture, manual or an automatic no-show capture, can only take up to what’s left. The hold then shows “Capture up to £Y”, and an Undo link lets you restore the full amount at any time.

Capture is idempotent - capturing an already-released hold is refused.
Once a deposit has been captured, settle it the other way with Refund instead of Release: refund the full amount, or enter less to refund only part of it. A partially-refunded deposit stays Captured and shows how much has been refunded and how much is left - refund again (it defaults to what’s left) to refund the rest.
Reducing a deposit or refunding part of one is logged on the booking’s History, same as any other deposit action.

Cancellations

If a booking with a hold is cancelled by you or the guest, the hold is released automatically - the guest is never left with a lingering authorisation on their card. This covers every payment on the booking, so any top-up (below) is released or refunded along with the original.

When a booking auto-cancels

Sidedoor also cancels some bookings for you: a guest is marked a no-show, or a booking is dropped because the guest never confirmed it in time. What happens to a live hold in those cases is set on the payment policy (Settings → Policies → General), so you decide whether the guest forfeits the deposit or gets it back:

Setting	Applies when	Default	Options
No-show deposits	A guest is marked a no-show.	Capture - the held amount is charged, so a no-show forfeits the deposit.	Capture, or Release / refund.
Unconfirmed deposits	A booking is auto-cancelled for not being confirmed in time.	Release / refund - the hold is cancelled and the guest keeps their money.	Release / refund, or Capture.

When a no-show leads to a Capture, the deposit isn’t taken the instant the guest is marked a no-show. It’s captured after a delay set on the payment policy (its no-show capture delay), so there’s a window to review or reverse the decision before any money moves. Set this delay alongside the options above under Settings → Policies → General. If you’ve reduced the deposit (above), the automatic capture respects that limit too, taking no more than what’s left to capture.

Only a live hold is affected, and this applies to every hold on the booking, including a top-up (below) - so a no-show or unconfirmed cancellation settles all of them the same way. A deposit already charged up front (a Capture policy) or already settled at the door is left as-is. See No-show and late handling for how a booking gets marked a no-show in the first place.

If the guest turns up after all, clearing the no-show (removing the mark, or checking them in) automatically refunds a no-show charge that was already taken from the hold - the booking’s History logs it as No-show charge refunded. A deposit taken under a Capture policy isn’t affected, since that’s money the guest paid upfront rather than a no-show charge.

Requesting a deposit, or more when a booking grows

The same form on the Deposit tab asks a guest to pay or authorise, at any time, whether or not there’s a deposit on the booking yet:

With no deposit in place, it reads Request a deposit. Enter an amount, choose whether to Notify guest over the channels set in Settings → Notifications, and send. The guest gets a secure link to a payment page where they complete the hold or payment themselves. Requesting a hold on a booking 72 hours or more before the visit works the same way as at checkout: the guest saves a card now rather than authorising immediately, and Sidedoor places the hold automatically closer to the visit
- see Advance bookings above.
With a deposit or hold already in place, it reads Request more. Enter the extra amount and the guest gets a link for that amount only - its own payment, kept separate from what they’ve already given. What they already paid or had held stays exactly where it is; if they never pay the top-up, nothing else changes.
On a booking with a saved card waiting for its automatic hold (the 72-hour-advance case above), Request more simply raises the amount that hold is placed for when the time comes. Nothing is sent to the guest.

When the booking has unpaid pre-order or add-on items your team added, the form also offers a Purpose: Deposit (the default) or Pre-order payment. Choose Pre-order payment to request money for those items specifically. Once it’s captured, it marks the unpaid items it covers as paid, in the order they were added - a part payment only covers whole items it can afford, never part of one. A card hold marks nothing until it’s captured, and refunding the payment marks the items not paid again. A regular deposit never marks pre-order items paid this way, even when it covers the total due - see the Pre-order tab.

Both use the same £0.50 minimum. A top-up follows the booking’s own Hold or Capture behaviour - a card hold on a Hold booking, a charge on a Capture booking - and (other than the deferred, saved-card case above) always reaches the guest as a link they approve themselves, never charged straight to a saved card.

Each top-up gets its own row on the Payments table, with its own status and the same Capture, Release and Refund controls as the original payment once it’s held or captured. If more than one hold is live on the same booking at once, a Capture across every hold control settles them together up to an amount you choose - the original deposit first, then each top-up, oldest first; anything the amount doesn’t reach is released.

A payment link still awaiting the guest, on either the original payment or a top-up, can be Re-sent or Cancelled from its own row; one that’s lapsed can be Re-requested. You can send a fresh request even after an earlier payment was refunded, not only after one that was released or expired.

Cancelling a booking, checking a guest in and the no-show handling above all settle every payment on the booking together, not just the original - see Cancellations and When a booking auto-cancels above.

The guest sees an outstanding top-up on their booking in the guest app, with a line explaining their booking has grown and a Pay now button for the difference.

A guest who pays or holds for items through a pre-order request link adds its own top-up row here too, held or charged exactly like any other top-up.

A payment made for the pre-order (above) is labelled (pre-order) on the Payments table and shows as a Pre-order sale on Billing → Sales and in the payout breakdown, rather than as a Deposit or Deposit top-up. It isn’t counted as a credit on the reservation’s Till tab.

When a guest raises their party size

A guest can raise a booking’s party size themselves, and if that pushes the deposit or minimum hold higher, Sidedoor asks them to pay only the difference as a top-up: a separate hold (for a Hold policy) or charge (for a Capture policy) for just the extra amount, approved on its own payment page. The original deposit or hold is left exactly as it was - never released or refunded.

The party size only changes once that top-up goes through. If the guest doesn’t complete it, the booking stays at its original party size. You’ll see the top-up listed alongside the original deposit on the reservation, and the booking’s History logs “Guest increased the party size from X to Y”.

On an advance booking where the hold hasn’t been placed yet, raising the party size just raises the amount that hold will take when it’s placed automatically - the party size and minimum spend update straight away, with nothing sent to the guest. The History entry for that case reads “Guest increased the party size. Deposit increased”.