How Clients Purchase Packages and Redeem Credits Online

This guide explains how clients purchase memberships through your booking portal, and how account credit is applied to their bookings and orders.

Terminology first. Collar has no “packages” product and no session-credit pot. What exists is:

Memberships — recurring plans a client buys online, which unlock access to services.
Credit — a money balance on a client’s account, added by your team, which is spent automatically against their bookings and orders.

If you sell “10 daycare days,” you’re modelling it with one of those two, and they behave very differently.

Prerequisites

A client signed in with the email address on their account.
A credit or debit card for online payment.
The membership published — Status set to In stock on its Details tab. Hidden, Archived, and Out of stock items don’t appear to clients.
Staff access to client profiles to view balances and add credit.

Part 1: The Client’s Online Purchase Journey

Find the membership. Memberships appear in your booking portal in the same list as your services — there is no separate packages tab. Clients reach it through your portal link.
Review the plan. They see the name, description, price, and billing interval (Monthly, Bi-annually, or Yearly). Any variations you’ve configured are selected here.
Check out. The client signs in with their email and a 4-digit code if they haven’t already, enters card details, and confirms. The button label is whatever you set as the service’s Action Button Label — “Subscribe Now” by default.
Card authentication. UK and EU clients may be asked to approve the payment in their banking app under Strong Customer Authentication. This is Stripe’s 3D Secure step and is expected.
Confirmation. The membership becomes active and the client receives their confirmation by email. From here Stripe handles renewals automatically on the interval you set.

What does not happen at this point: no credits are deposited into a wallet, and no tags are applied to the client’s profile. A membership grants access, which is enforced by the service’s booking rules (see below), not by a credit balance.

Part 2: How Credit Is Applied

1. Credit is applied automatically — everywhere

When a client with a credit balance checks out, Collar deducts the credit from the order total by itself. This happens the same way in the booking portal, in the mobile app, and in the staff New Booking modal.

The checkout summary shows a credit to be used line with the amount deducted.
If the credit covers the whole order, the amount payable drops to zero.
Two balances are combined: the client’s account credit and any branch-specific credit held with your business.

There is no “Use Package Credit” or “Apply Credit” option for staff to tick, and none is needed — if the client has a balance and the item is eligible, it is already applied by the time you see the total.

2. What credit can and can’t pay for

Credit applies to services and products. It is not applied to membership purchases — a client with £200 of credit still pays for their membership by card. Plan around this before offering credit as a membership incentive.

3. Applying credit to an existing booking

There is no retrospective “apply credit” action on a booking. Credit is calculated when the order total is worked out. If a booking’s total needs revisiting, Admins can use Recalculate Total from the booking’s action menu — available while the booking has no invoice and isn’t yet paid — or Adjust Amount to change the payable figure directly.

4. How members book at member prices

A membership doesn’t discount a booking on its own. The usual setup is:

Create the service the membership covers, priced at £0.00 or at your member rate.
On that service’s Rules tab, set Allow bookings from to Pets Subscribed to and select the membership.

Only pets on an active membership can then book it, at whatever price you set.

Multi-Pet Households

Credit is a single money balance on the client’s account, so it covers whichever pet is booked — there is no per-pet allocation and no household pool to configure or exhaust.

Memberships work differently: a membership is created against specific pets, and only those pets can book the services it unlocks. If a household wants two pets covered, both must be on the membership.

Viewing Credit History

Staff: open the client’s profile and select the Credit tab. The header shows the Order balance and Membership balance; the ledger below lists every movement — Credit added, Credit removed, Credit used, Credit refunded, Credit expired, Debit added — with the amount, date, any note your team left, and the order number where it was spent. Clicking an entry with an order opens that booking or order.

Clients: in the mobile app, the profile has a Credit history section, and each order’s details show the credit applied to it.

Important Notes, Tips & Warnings

Tip: cancellations restore credit. When an order paid partly or wholly with credit is cancelled or refunded, the credit goes back to the client’s balance and appears in the ledger as Credit refunded.
Note: credit can expire. When it’s added, staff can set an expiry date. Expired credit leaves the balance and shows as Credit expired; it can’t be recovered, only re-added.
Warning: credit won’t buy a membership. If a client expects their balance to cover a renewal, it won’t — the card is charged in full.
Warning: Strong Customer Authentication. UK and EU clients may need to approve a purchase in their banking app. A payment left un-approved won’t complete.
Note: variations are billed as configured. Add-ons priced as variations are part of the service total, so credit applies to them the same way. They are not separate from the “package.”

Troubleshooting

Issue: A member is charged full price in the portal. Resolution: A membership doesn’t discount anything by itself. Check the service’s Rules tab: Allow bookings from must be Pets Subscribed to with that membership selected, and the service must be priced at your member rate. Then confirm the client is signed in with their registered email, that the membership is Active, and that the pet being booked is on it.

Issue: A client’s credit balance wasn’t used. Resolution: Check whether they were buying a membership — credit is never applied to those. Otherwise open the Credit tab and confirm the balance is still there and hasn’t expired.

Issue: A client’s payment was declined at checkout. Resolution: Ask them to check for a block from their bank, and look up the decline reason in your Stripe Dashboard under Payments. If they’re in the UK or EU, confirm they completed the 3D Secure prompt.

Issue: Staff can’t find a “Use credit” option when creating a booking. Resolution: There isn’t one. Credit is applied automatically — check the pre-order summary in the New Booking modal for the credit line before confirming.