Please visit our new help center at help.thinkreservations.comYou can also access this by clicking the ? button inside ThinkReservations.

Automatic Payments (Advanced Deposit)

ThinkReservations has an unadvertised feature called "Advanced Deposits" or Automatic Payments. This feature will automatically charge all guest's most recently-retained credit card on file for the full remaining balance. The system will charge the card very early in the day.


How do I Enable Advanced Deposit?

Please submit a ticket to ThinkReservations. In order to enable this, we need to know how many days prior to check-in would you like to have the remaining balance charged. This will apply for all units and bookings, including OTA reservations where you have a credit card on file. These requests are handled weekly so we appreciate your patience while we enable this feature on your account. Our tech team will enable this feature on your account free of charge.

If you need to disable this feature, please contact support so we can disable it on your account.


Once Enabled...

  • After our team has enabled this feature, your guests will have the remaining balance taken a certain number of days before check-in for all units. If you need to have the number of days adjusted, please reach out to support.
  • You will get a daily digest of the payments for your business via email each day. The guest will not get a separate email after a charge is made on their account. We recommend you set up one of your email rules to alert your guests that you will be charging their card (today/yesterday/this week, etc.).
  • Automatic payments will have the note "Automatic" next to the payment. This is also visible in the payment reports.
  • It's important to note that you can also disable this on a case-by-case basis for reservations that you would like to not have the system take the remaining balance.


How to disable/re-enable for a specific reservation:

  1. Open the reservation in question.
  2. Change the setting on the left for ADVANCED DEPOSIT.
    1. Enabled means that ThinkReservations will attempt to charge their card on file for the remaining balance.
    2. Disabled means that ThinkReservations will not charge the card.
  3. Done - no need to save.

Which card is charged?

When you retain a card in ThinkReservations, you either associate the card with the reservation or with the customer. The system will charge the most recently added "reservation" credit card. If no reservation credit card, it will charge the newest customer credit card.

Please let us know if you would be interested in enabling this feature!

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