PREPAID PACKAGES
Prepaid package software is the system that sells a block of visits up front and keeps count of how many are left. Sell ten visits instead of one, take the money on day one, and know at any moment exactly what you still owe. The balance lives on the customer’s phone and on your dashboard, and the two cannot disagree.
Two things at once, and it helps to see them separately. You are selling a discount — the block costs less than the visits bought one at a time. And you are selling a commitment — the customer has decided, once, to come back ten times rather than deciding ten separate times.
The second is the valuable half. A customer with six grooms left does not shop around, because shopping around would mean abandoning something they have already paid for. You have bought yourself out of the weekly competition for their attention.
Money taken for work not yet done is a liability. That sounds like accountancy pedantry until the month you have spent it and still owe forty grooms. A block sold in March is revenue that belongs to March through August, whatever your bank balance says in March.
Which is the practical argument for tracking outstanding balances properly rather than in a notebook: not neatness, but knowing the size of the work you have already been paid for. The dashboard totals it for you — every client, every remaining visit, one screen.
Every redemption is an entry appended to a ledger, not a number overwritten. The balance is what the entries add up to, so the history is always readable and an undo is itself an entry with a time on it rather than a quiet correction.
The decrement is conditional: it applies only if the balance is still what it was a moment ago. Two members of staff scanning the same customer at the same second cannot take two visits off a package with one left, and a redemption recorded offline cannot overdraw the block when it syncs. That is a property of how it is written, not a warning in the manual.
Big enough to matter, small enough to finish. A block that takes two years to use is a liability you will still be carrying when your prices have changed. Most trades land somewhere between six and twenty visits depending on how often people come.
The calculator takes your single-visit price, your block size and your discount and shows both sides: cash collected now, and service still owed. The prepaid packages guide goes further into pricing and the policy questions worth settling before you sell the first one.
If what you want is more frequent visits rather than money up front, that is a digital punch card — earn something on the tenth visit, nothing paid in advance. One pass can carry a package and a stamp card at the same time, and you choose at the counter which a scan spends.
A block of visits bought in one payment and used over time — ten washes, six grooms, twenty walks, a class pack. The customer pays less per visit than they would one at a time; you get the money before the work and a customer who has already decided to come back.
Enough that the block is obviously better value, not so much that you have sold your year at a loss. Somewhere around 10–20% off the sum of the parts is common. Put your own numbers in the calculator: it shows what you collect up front and, at the same size, what you still owe in work — because both are consequences of the same decision.
Not really, and this is the part worth getting straight. A package sold is a debt: you have been paid for visits you have not delivered. Spending all of it in month one is how a business ends up unable to staff the visits it already sold. Treat the cash as arriving over the life of the block, however it landed in the account.
Reverse it. Every change is an entry in an append-only ledger rather than a number being edited, so an undo is recorded as its own entry with a time on it — nothing is rewritten and the history stays readable. The balance cannot go below zero either: two staff tapping at once cannot overdraw a package, because the decrement only applies if the balance is still what it was.
That is your policy and your local consumer law, not something software decides. Whatever you choose, write it in the note on the pass so the customer read it when they bought — an unused balance you are silent about is an argument waiting to happen. You can also set an expiry per package, though many places restrict expiring prepaid value.
A membership charges monthly and hopes you do not come; a package is paid once for a defined amount of work. Packages ask less commitment, which makes them much easier to sell to someone who has used you twice, and they do not need a subscription to cancel. The money still arrives up front.
Search them up on your dashboard by name, phone number, pet or vehicle, and redeem from your side. The balance is held on your account, not only in their phone, so a forgotten phone or no smartphone at all is not a problem.
Five active passes free, no card required. Issue one to yourself and redeem against it.