PTA card machine

[Goldfish43]

Hi,
just wondering if anyone’s school PTA has a card machine?
Hardly anyone seems to have cash anymore and when doing PTA events we end up having to get massive floats to have enough change for everyone’s £10/20 notes!
Is there a quick and easy (and preferably free/cheap) way to go cashless?
thanks

I went to a school event and you could buy a set of vouchers for £5 or £10. Vouchers were A4 sheets if paper with £1 50p etc written on them. Stalls then cut off whatever person was spending.

So you paid at the stalls with your prepaid bits of paper. Sounds complicated but actually worked quite well.

Following with interest as card machine would be good if it not too complicated.

My son's old school used Bopp. Worked really well for us

We use SumUp for Scouts' events.

We use SumUp at school events

At our PTA we use a SumUp reader. Really useful. We upped the price of things but the amount it costs to use and no one minds and prefer using card anyway to cash

I use a Sumup Air for work. It cost about £15 in an Amazon sale and only charges something like 1.6% per transaction. Well worth it!!

Great, thanks everyone for your messages so far.
For those who use sumup, can you have multiple points to pay, or is it one machine and all payments have to go through that?
mum just thinking for eg summer/Christmas fairs where there are lots of different stalls in a spread out area I’m not sure how it would work?
How do you all manage it?
Thank you
😊

You can have multiple SumUp readers but to reduce the amount needed at a fete then perhaps a token system could work?

We use sumup. You can set up multiple users and have multiple pay points - just need a machine for each pay point. They are often on offer at half price somewhere!

We have Zettle card readers. I think they’re about £30 but a parent on the pta had a contact and got us a better price. Very handy to be able to have several on various stalls at the summer fete!

At dc primary school the pta used Sum Up and you can programme it with different codes e.g 1 for the bar, 2 for the Bbq.

Could you set up a paypal account?

Square are similar to sum up also east to get and use.

We made the stalls token only and then sold tokens using the card facility. Did have some connection issues at times.

SumUp has/had the cheapest rate, at 1.69% and a similar alternative is Zettle at 1.75%

They have no monthly fees, with the only other cost being the card reader itself.
A non guaranteed trick is to search for card readers on the internet and put a SumUp and/or a Zettle into the basket on a few sites. Then don’t complete the purchase. Wait and you may then get contacted with ‘reminders’ and potential offers.

Intercard advertises fees of 1%
(though I note that they also quote an ‘authorisation charge’ of 1p per transaction ….. which implies its 1% plus 1p)

That could mean that a £1 sale on all of the above would have a fee of 2p due to rounding but when transactions are higher then there begins to be a difference in the fees.

Intercard readers seem to only start with 3g connected readers, whereas SumUp and Zettle can provide cheaper Bluetooth readers as well as 3g readers.
Bluetooth readers need to be run via a smartphone or tablet with their own connection, but are cheaper (or potentially free)

An intercard probably starts at around £80, and SumUp/Zettle £40 for app based (but there are always deals to be found) and £80 plus for readers with their own connections

To process a card sale you need the reader to hand, so one reader means one person can take card payments - which can be managed by a PTA.
But if you have multiple readers then different people can log on at once and take payments separately
They can all log on to the same account and take payments without conflicting - but that potentially means they could reset the bank account, so you can create ‘staff accounts’ to let other people take payments without additional capabilities

Note that the PTA does not have to own the machines, you just need the bank account and to set up an account with the relevant processing company. Then you can borrow readers if you know people with them - or get one reader for the PTA and borrowed ones on an event day for extra stalls etc
(It’s that simple with the app based ones as you log in on the app, but independent self connected readers are set to the account it pays into)

If you want printed receipts then you need one of the upgraded readers, but the apps give the option of a text or email receipt

Other options such as PayPal exist, and can be tied into a SumUp/Zettle etc as well
You can set up a QR code that the person paying scans on their phone and sends payment to you