Ask for a Donation at Checkout
A ReStore register can invite the customer to give at the point of sale: round the sale up to the next dollar, or add a flat donation. Both are real donations, receipted and recorded against the donor, and neither one is taxed.
Nothing appears at the register until an administrator switches it on — see Turning it on below.
What the cashier sees
When giving is switched on for your store, a Give panel appears in the cart, below the coupon button and above the totals. It is there while you are still ringing items and it disappears once you tap Pay: a sale that has gone to the card reader is locked at the amount the customer is being charged, so nothing can be added to it.
The iPad register has the same panel, in the cart on the left above the totals, and it works the same way: once a card sale has started the panel locks until the sale finishes or is cancelled.
Round-up
Tap the round-up button — it is labelled whatever your affiliate chose, usually something like Round up for Habitat. Ayuna works out the difference to the next dollar and shows it on the line.
The amount is deliberately not shown before you tap. Ayuna calculates it on the server, after any donation and after tax, so the figure on the screen is exactly what the customer will be charged. If the customer changes their mind, tap the × on the line and it comes straight back off.
If you ask and the customer says no before you tap anything, tap No thanks. Nothing is added to the sale — this just records that the customer was asked, which is the only way anyone can tell later whether the round-up is working.
Donation
Tap one of the preset amounts, or Other to type one. A second donation replaces the first rather than adding to it, so correcting a mistake is a single tap.
The largest amount you can enter is set by your affiliate — $249.99 unless they changed it. That ceiling exists because a single contribution of $250 or more needs a written acknowledgment in the donor's hands before they can deduct it, and a receipt printed at a register is not reliably that. A customer who wants to give more should be pointed at the donation page, where the acknowledgment is handled properly.
A donation with nothing else
A customer who buys nothing can still give. On either register, tap a preset amount or Other with nothing rung: the cart reads Donation only, the totals show the gift, and Pay (or Checkout on the iPad) takes it by cash or card exactly like any sale. It is receipted, recorded and counted the same way as a gift on a purchase, and the same ceiling applies. The round-up is not offered until there is something to round.
What the customer sees on the receipt
The donation prints on its own line between Tax and TOTAL — below tax, because a donation is never part of what is taxed — with the sentence "No goods or services were provided in exchange for this contribution." attached to that line.
Underneath the total, the receipt carries a short donation block with your affiliate's name, its EIN, the date and the amount. That block is the customer's substantiation document, which is why the receipt is always created even if the customer takes no paper and gives no email address: they can retrieve it later from the link on the sale.
The same block prints on the card terminal's receipt, on the emailed receipt, and on a reprint.
Returns and voids
Returning merchandise does not claw back a donation. The customer gave it; it is theirs to have given. (An affiliate that prefers otherwise can turn on Refund donations on return — even then only a sale returned in full reverses the gift, because a donation was not bought per item and apportioning it against merchandise would put an invented number on a tax document.)
When that setting is on and a sale comes back in full, the donation is refunded with the merchandise: the refund total on the return includes it, so a card refund goes back to the same card and a cash refund comes out of the drawer. That is not optional once the gift is reversed — reversing it cancels the receipt the donor was given, and money held against a cancelled acknowledgment is not a donation.
Voiding a whole sale that carried a donation needs a manager's approval (the cashier picks the manager from the list and the manager enters their PIN), whatever the affiliate's setting for ordinary voids. It is gated because the void withdraws a receipt the donor already holds: the donation, its accounting entry and the acknowledgment are all reversed together. Both switches — Require a manager to void a sale and Refund donations on a full return — live under Administration → Checkout giving → Voids and returns.
In the books, a round-up and a checkout donation are two different entries: each names its kind and the sale it came from, and each can credit its own income account if your bookkeeper maps one under Accounting → Account Mappings (see Reconcile donations with your accounting system).
The register asks which manager is approving before it takes a PIN, which is not an extra step for its own sake. Without a name, a mistyped PIN would have to be checked against every manager's PIN at the affiliate — so two wrong attempts could lock out managers who were not even in the building. Naming the manager first means the PIN is checked against that one person.
Anything that fails behind the scenes after a sale completes shows up on Giving Exceptions rather than stopping the lane, and a weekly digest of that report goes to your end-of-day closeout email recipients.
Confirm the first posting
No check can tell whether the account your bookkeeper picked is the one they meant: two accounts that both balance look identical to the system. So after the first register gift posts to your books, the Checkout giving page shows the entry it produced — the sale, the kind of gift, the amount, and each line of the entry with the account it hit — and asks one person to confirm it once. If the accounts are not the ones you meant, the card links to Account Mappings so you can fix them before the second gift follows the first. The card disappears once confirmed and never comes back.
Turning it on
An administrator sets this up under Administration → POS Settings → Checkout Giving.
- Round-up — switch it on, choose what to round up to (next 25¢, 50¢, dollar, $5, $10), and write the button's label.
- Donation — switch it on, set the preset amounts and the largest gift you will accept at a register.
- What the receipt says — the donee name defaults to your affiliate's name and only needs filling in if your registered entity name is different from the name over the storefront. The disclosure sentence has a sensible default.
- By store — each store can be set to default, on, or off. Default follows the affiliate. A store set to off never asks, even when the affiliate has giving on, so one store that would rather not ask does not force you to switch it off everywhere. A store cannot switch on what the affiliate has switched off.
Press Save at the bottom of the page; the switches are not saved one by one. The web register shows the Give panel the next time it loads a cart. The iPad picks the change up when its Register tab is next opened, when the app returns to the foreground, or at once with Settings → Refresh settings from server.
Why the switches may be greyed out
Giving cannot be switched on until your affiliate has an EIN on file. It is set on the affiliate record, not on this page. A donation receipt that cannot state the organisation's EIN is one a donor's tax preparer will send back, and the affiliate usually finds out from the donor — so Ayuna refuses to start taking donations it cannot receipt properly.