The PoolDues Front Desk iPad app is typically all our clients need to manage their concession stand sales by simply deducting pre-paid credit from their member accounts (akin to school cafeteria accounts or money in a Starbucks app). Member accounts can even go negative during the day (so pre-paying isn’t necessarily required), and your club can either auto-charge the member’s payment method on file later that night or wait for the member to manually reload their own account. Since many concessions stands only operating during “adult swim”, this is a fast and easy way to get snacks into the hands of members without fumbling with cash or credit cards. If any of this was new to you, read back here.
Caught up on the PoolDues way? Let’s talk Point of Sale hardware / software. If you decide to supplement our way of doing things with a POS to take credit or debit cards, we can help you get setup there too.
Let’s begin with where the concession stand order will originate which is within the PoolDues Front Desk App. Once all the inventory has been tapped, the order is ready to be paid for. If a member does not have enough pre-paid credit (or if a non-member is buying), our app has a “Pay Cashier” button next to the “Pay with Account Credit” button…
This will open a prompt reminding the cashier of the total and to switch to your POS or other on-site method such as cash. It will look something like this…
If all goes well charging the buyer, the cashier will hit “Done. Submit Order!” and the app will log the inventory items sold on the website and note the order was not paid using pre-paid concession credit.
Time to talk about PayPal’s POS…
Option 1 – Getting the PayPal Card Reader
A PayPal-based Point of Sale system is the obvious choice for our clients since they already have an account with PayPal for their website sales. It just makes sense to keep all their money flowing into one account.
To buy their physical Card Reader, visit this link on PayPal’s site. At the time of this writing, your first reader is only $29. The one we are referring to (and tested ourselves) is shown below…
The Card Reader works with their POS App (linked here) for iPad or iPhone. Download their app to the same iPad you are running the PoolDues Front Desk app so your cashiers can quickly switch between them.
Setup is super fast.
- After downloading the app, your financial officer will need to login using the club’s PayPal credentials. This connects your PayPal account in the app.
- When first turning on the Card Reader there is a QR code on screen. Scan that from the iPad’s camera, it will magically open up the POS App, connecting app to the physical reader via Bluetooth.
The initial setup is done!
Within the POS App, your cashier just types in the amount to charge, then presses the “Card” button. The buyer just taps their card on the Reader. It can take between 5 and 10 seconds for the order to complete.
Option 2 – Using an iPhone Only
iPhones including the iPhone XS, XS Max, XR, iPhone 11, 11 Pro, 11 Pro Max, iPhone 12, 12 Pro, 12 Pro Max, 12 mini, iPhone 13, 13 Pro, 13 Pro Max, 13 mini, iPhone 14, 14 Pro, 14 Pro Max, 14 Plus, and newer models can simply run the same PayPal POS App mentioned above (here’s the link again), but instead of requiring the physical card reader device, buyers simply place their credit card (or their own iPhone with Apple Pay) over the area in the app below that says “Hold Here to Pay”. You can read more about this recent feature on PayPal’s site.
Identical to the charging instructions in Option 1, the cashier simply switches to the PayPal POS App, enters the amount, then choose the “Tap to Pay” button (instead of “Card“).
Important note: Although the PayPal POS app allows for doing quite a few more things (like managing it’s own inventory separate from the PoolDues one), your cashiers only need to enter an amount and charge. Nothing else. Remember the website (via the order initiated in the PoolDues Front Desk app) are itemizing inventory logging what’s sold.
Switching Back to the PoolDues App
After switching back to our app, the cashier should note the order was completed (assuming it was) by pressing the button seen below…
As mentioned above, any orders paid outside of our pre-paid concession credit method are noted in the Inventory Sales Logs within the website as an “On-site payment method”. An example screenshot below shows a side-by-side tally of the two methods on an actual client site.
To POS or not to POS…
If your members are used to paying for concessions with credit/debit cards or cash, you might think they won’t gel with something “new” like pre-paid concession credit, but that’s not so – we see quick member adoption rates. We see members load up right away once the option is offered.
Some of our clients have even told their members that the pre-paid credit method is the only option. Sounds drastic but remember, members are already paying similarly when they load up Dunkin Donut or Starbucks cards. And once everything is virtual / cashless, members never have to give their young kids a credit card to go wait in line.
That said, if you want to support non-member or guest payments, you should have a POS or an old-fashioned cash box (or be willing to tell members to just pay for their guests).
Among clubs that have both options we tend to see a ratio similar to what you see below in the screenshot (this is real data from a client’s sales in July 2025)…
For this client, members used pre-paid credit at about a 9 to 1 ratio over traditional methods. This ratio is similar to what we see with most clients.
And sometimes we have a client that is “all in” on the pre-paid credit. Look at these numbers…
