What a paint-your-own-pottery till needs that Square does not

A general-purpose till like Square is built to ring up items and take payment, and it does that well. Point it at a pottery studio counter, though, and it runs out of things it understands almost immediately: a sale here is rarely just a sale, it is attached to a visit, sometimes to a party of ten sharing one table, and sometimes to a piece that will not exist as a finished thing for another two to three weeks. A till built for a shop has no way to hold any of that.

A pottery counter is not a café counter

A café till rings up a coffee and a cake and the transaction is done. A pottery counter is doing several jobs at once: checking a party in against a booking, settling whatever balance is still owed on that booking, ringing up any extra pieces or add-ons they picked up on the day, and often handing back finished pieces from a previous visit at the very same moment. None of that is a simple item sale, and treating it as one loses the connection between the payment and the booking that explains it.

A generic till can take the money. It cannot tell you which booking it belongs to, whether it was a deposit or a balance, or what happens to the shelf as a result. For a studio owner trying to reconcile the day afterwards, that gap is where the real work goes.

Balances, deposits and the walk-in who joined late

Most bookings in a pottery studio are not paid in full on the day they are made. A deposit secures the spot online, and the rest is settled at the counter when the customer actually arrives, which means the till needs to know, for every single booking, exactly what is still owed and to whom.

Then there is the walk-in who joins a table part way through, or the extra guest squeezed onto a bench that was already full. A café till has no concept of adding one more person to an existing group and working out what they owe separately from the rest. A pottery till has to, because it happens most Saturdays.

It also needs to know what has already been paid and what has not, without a member of staff having to ask the customer to remind them. A family who paid a deposit online three weeks ago should not have to explain that again at the counter: the till should already know the amount, and simply ask for the difference.

Pieces on the receipt and firing fees

Some studios charge for the piece itself, some charge a session fee that includes it, and some add a separate firing fee depending on size or glaze used. Whatever your own pricing looks like, it needs to sit on the same receipt as everything else from that visit, not on a separate slip of paper that gets reconciled by hand later.

A till that understands pieces as well as bookings can put the whole visit on one receipt: the session, the piece, any extras, and the balance, all against the same customer and the same booking, so nobody has to cross-reference three different systems to work out what a single family actually paid for a Saturday afternoon.

Gift cards sold and redeemed at the same counter

Gift cards are an easy sale at a pottery counter (someone finishing their own visit will often buy one on the way out), but they are only useful if they can also be redeemed at that same counter without a member of staff having to look anything up by hand or check with a manager for a balance.

Selling and redeeming a gift card should be the same simple action at the till as taking any other payment, with the balance checked and updated automatically, rather than a paper voucher and an honesty system that only works until someone loses track of what has already been spent.

Cash-up that agrees with the bookings report

The end of the day is where most of this either pays off or falls apart. If the till and the booking system are the same system, cashing up means the total taken at the counter should simply agree with what the bookings report says was due that day. If they are two separate systems, someone has to reconcile a card machine total, a cash drawer, and a spreadsheet of bookings, and explain every gap between them by hand.

A till that shares the same ledger as the booking engine turns cashing up from a forensic exercise into a quick check: does the number match. When it does not, you can see exactly which booking or payment caused the difference, rather than starting from zero.

Keep your card machine if you like it

None of this means throwing out hardware that already works for you. A studio that likes its existing card machine should be able to keep taking payment on it and simply record that a payment was taken outside the till, against the right booking, so the reconciliation still holds together even when the card payment itself happened somewhere else.

None of this needs to mean new hardware or a steep learning curve for staff. It means a till that was actually designed around a pottery studio's day, rather than one adapted from a shop counter and hoping the gaps do not matter.

Kilndar's till mode handles check-in, balances, pieces, gift cards and cash-up on the same ledger as your bookings, so the day's takings and the day's diary always agree. See it on the features page.