Collecting final or additional balances from customers is always a struggle for services that accept a deposit up front. A common scenario usually plays out like this:

• A quote is created and the customer is asked to pay a deposit in exchance for guaranteeing their time slot
• Later as the booking approaches, they’re asked to pay the remaining balance. This almost always results in a renegotiation of the itinerary, and often of price.
• Later, the customer requests to add gratuity
• Later, a vehicle comes back in a filthy state and a cleaning fee needs to be charged

Before automatic collection, a customer would need to type in their credit card number on an online payments page for each line item above, or you’d have to send out an invoice. What incentive would someone have to pay their cleaning fee except for maybe a moral one? It's in their booking contract, but it's still a little dicey.

Enter Collect Remaining Balance. This feature requires that payments have been enabled, and is automatically available for any reservation that has had any amount paid against it’s total by a customer via the online payment form.

When a customer makes a payment on a reservation we:

• Remember which cards were used for those payments
• Allow an admin to charge the remaining balance to any card that's already been used on that same reservation
• Send email payment receipts to customers whenever their card is charged

If a booking has any successful card payments (typed in by customer on the shared reservation) and there's a remaining balance, then there's a button in the finances module which allows you to capture that balance:

Right now it's up to you to reach out to customers and set expectations about how much they'll be charged and when, or to even decide that you want to collect payments this way at all. It’s an option, and totally up to you and your business process to decide how and when to best use it.