PTA event help

[Tigermummy123321]

Hi! I'm chair of a PTA for a prep school.
We have several events a year.
Our largest event is the Summer Fair in June.
At all of our events, we use Sum ups which is like a card reader machine. So if you type in the amount then people can scan their card and it gets paid into our PTA account.
These machines cost money, and the summer fair is so widespread that stalls are all over.
Has anybody figured out a better way to get around this e.g at a coconut shy stall, if it is £1 a go, most people bring notes. We have a float but it is never big enough and also everything is spread out. What I would ideally love is if there is an app that when people arrived they scan a QR code and it opens up a link which shows things like menus, sit map, show timings etc and even a link to quick pay eg if you want to pay the pound for the coconut shy stall from your phone.
Any ideas, or how people do this, please let me know- in this day and age, there must be a better system for cashless!

For a lower tech option... could you sell tokens beforehand, which can be exchanged on stalls?

We have a few sum up machines for the entry and raffle where there are loads of taps. Then on other stalls we gave a QR Code people scan to pay which takes them to a page. We also get people to download the sum up app on their phones and give them a log in if they have a newish iPhone as it acts just like the sum up reader- people tap and pay. Annoyingly at Christmas this wasn't working on newer android phones but I think they are working on that as they have the capacity to do it.

Can you use the app. We have one machine but some people install the app and link to the account. Each stall can have someone with the app for payment.

As PP said - we use a token system - each token £1 and then each stall/ item has a price in tokens. That way you focus all the payments in one place. We also sold tokens a few afternoons after school in the week beforehand so parents didn't have to queue on the day.

Tokens here too: purchase with the sum up machine and spend at stalls. QR codes to links to pay have been tried but it's slower.

Our school do tokens - £5 gets you 10 tokens. They have 2 people with a card machine each selling them. Then the stalls take either tokens or a cash equivalent (for those who don't want to buy tokens). I'm not on the PTA but from a user experience it works well!

As others have said, we have a few SumUp machines that people can use to buy tokens, or they can buy in the playground in the week before the event, so the event itself is cashless. But at other events parents have downloaded the app and been able to take SumUp payments too.