Payment links and the pay page
How to send someone a link to pay you, what the page shows them, and why a link you were paid by UPI still needs marking off by hand.
Two different QRs, for two different moments
The QR on the settle screen is for a customer standing in front of you: it lives for as long as that bill is open and it is never shared. A payment link is for someone who is not in the room — an advance on a catering order, a deposit on a booking, a bill somebody promised to pay from home. It is a web address you send, and it stays live until it is paid or cancelled.
Neither of them is a sale. Both record that money is expected or received; the bill is a separate act.
Creating one
Open payment links in the back office and start a new one. It takes three things:
- An amount. Required, and it must be more than nothing.
- A note. Optional, and worth writing — it is what you and the customer will both read later on a list of otherwise identical rows.
- A customer. Optional. Attaching one lets you find the link by their name afterwards.
Creating it mints a random code that nobody can guess or count up to, and that code is the link. The list is searchable by the note, the customer and the code itself — the code is the only handle a link with neither note nor customer has, and it is what somebody quotes back to you on the phone.
What the person you send it to sees
A single page with the amount, your note, and a UPI QR built from your business's UPI ID. They scan and pay. That is the whole page for most accounts.
A card and netbanking button appears below the QR only if your account has a payment provider connected. Where it is offered, that route is the one that reports back to us — the link flips itself to paid when the provider's own signed confirmation arrives, which is the entire point of using it.
If the link has already been paid or cancelled, the page says so instead, so a forwarded message cannot collect the same money twice.
The part that catches people out
A UPI payment on a link does not mark the link as paid. The QR sends money straight from their bank to yours; nothing in that path passes through us, so we never learn it happened. The link sits there reading as open, and it will keep reading as open forever.
So when your bank shows the money, come back to the list and mark it paid yourself. Only an open link can be marked paid, so pressing it twice cannot do anything.
Cancel is the other way out. It closes the link and switches off the public page in the same breath, so it can no longer be presented for payment. Neither marking paid nor cancelling can be undone.
A link is not a bill
Marking a link paid changes its status and nothing else. It writes no order, takes no bill number, charges no GST and adds nothing to your day's totals. That is deliberate — a link is a request for money, not a fiscal document, and inventing an invoice from one would put a number on your books that no sale stands behind.
When the money needs to be a sale, ring it on the till or use the Virtual Terminal. Both of those produce a proper bill with a proper number.