Payment Methods is the list of ways your property can take money — cash, check, credit card, ACH, and any additional methods set up for your business. This screen controls which of them staff can select when taking a payment or issuing a refund.
This is not where customers' saved cards live. The cards and bank accounts your customers have stored for AutoPay are on each customer's record in CRM. This screen defines the payment methods themselves, for the whole system.
Accessing Payment Methods
Navigate to System Settings from the left navigation pane, then select the Payment Methods tile. Viewing the list requires the view payment methods permission; changing anything requires edit payment methods.
What the List Shows
Column | What it means |
Name | The method as staff see it in the payment screen — for example Cash, Check, Credit Card, ACH. |
Enabled | Whether the method is available at all. Disabling it removes it from every payment and refund screen. |
Enable For Payments | Whether staff can take money using this method. |
Enable For Refunds | Whether staff can return money using this method. |
Is Custom? | Yes for methods added for your business, No for the ones built into Sharper. |
Note: A method must be Enabled before Enable For Payments or Enable For Refunds can be turned on for it. Disabling the method also turns both of these off, even if they were previously on.
Payments and refunds are controlled separately on purpose. A method you accept but never refund through — a booking-channel method that settles outside Sharper, for example — can be left on for payments and off for refunds, so staff cannot accidentally issue a refund down a path the money never travelled.
Built-In Methods Cannot Be Renamed
Methods that ship with Sharper — the ones showing No in the Is Custom? column — are locked. Opening one shows its fields greyed out and the Save button unavailable. This is deliberate: Sharper's accounting behaviour keys off these names, and renaming Cash or Check would change where money posts in your general ledger.
You can still enable and disable a built-in method, and turn it on or off for payments and refunds, from the list. Those controls work on every method, locked or not.
Turning Methods On and Off
Select one or more methods in the list using the checkboxes, then choose the action you want. The available bulk actions are Enable, Disable, enable or disable for payments, and enable or disable for refunds.
Disabling a payment method does not alter payments already taken with it. Historical records, reports, and accounting entries keep the method they were recorded against. The change only affects what staff can select going forward.
Which Account a Payment Method Posts To
This is the most common question about this screen, and the answer is that it is not set here.
Sharper chooses the bank or clearing account for a payment based on the payment's type — not on the individual method — and those accounts are set per outlet in Company Settings → Accounting Settings:
Payment type | Posts to |
Cash | Cash Bank Account |
Check — except ACH | Check Bank Account |
Everything else — all credit card, ACH, and any custom method | Default Bank Account |
An individual payment method cannot be given its own account. If you want one specific method — a booking channel, for example — to post to its own clearing account while other card payments stay where they are, that is not something you can configure. Changing the Default Bank Account moves every non-cash, non-check payment at that outlet, not just the one you had in mind. See Company Settings - Accounting Settings for the full rule.
Payment Methods Match
System Settings also has a Payment Methods Match tile, which maps Sharper's payment methods to the matching records in your connected accounting system so payments sync to the right place. This screen is configured by your Sharper implementation team and appears read-only to your staff. If payments are syncing to the wrong payment method in QuickBooks or Sage, that mapping is the thing to have checked.