Using your own payment provider

Connecting an account you already have instead of Booked Payments.

Most businesses take money through Booked Payments, which is built in and managed for you. If you already run a merchant account of your own — or you take payment at the counter and want Booked to stay out of it — there is an advanced option that records that choice instead. Here is what you get, what you give up, and the thing that catches people out.

What "your own provider" means

Booked Payments is end-to-end: Booked opens the account, verifies you, charges the card on your booking form, holds the balance, pays it into your bank and handles chargebacks — all on the Payments tab. Choosing your own provider hands every one of those jobs back to you.

The screen says as much: "You handle onboarding, compliance, disputes and payouts yourself — Booked won't show a balance for them." In practice the Your money, Payout schedule and Chargebacks & disputes cards never appear. No balance, no payout history, no refund button, no dispute handling — all of it lives in your provider's own dashboard.

So this option is a record of how you take money, not a second way of taking it. It suits a clinic that already sends payment links from its own account, or one that takes cash and card in the branch and wants the diary and the till kept separate.

Turning on the advanced option

The choice lives at the bottom of Booked › Settings › Payments, below the Booked Payments card. Nothing on that tab is visible until your licence is activated — if you see Activate your licence to take payments, use Go to Licence, activate your key, and come back.

1. Open Settings and choose the Payments tabThe tabs run down the left of the panel, with Payments sixth in the list.
2. Click “Use a different provider instead (advanced)”The link sits under the Booked Payments card. Clicking it replaces the link with the Other providers list and its warning.
3. Click the provider you useOne click switches your site over straight away — there is no confirmation step and nothing else to press. The tile you chose is marked Selected.

• 1The Payments tab — a vertical rail down the left of the Settings panel. Everything to do with money that Booked handles itself lives behind this one tab.
• 2The Booked Payments card — stays on screen whichever provider you pick, so Activate — it’s instant is always your route back.
• 3The warning — read it before you click a tile. Onboarding, compliance, disputes and payouts all become yours, and Booked stops showing a balance.
• 4Your chosen provider — marked Selected. Clicking a tile takes effect at once, with no confirmation, and the money panels disappear from the tab immediately.

Connecting your account

Pick anything other than External / manual and a Connect your … card appears underneath with that provider's fields. The card notes that "Your keys are stored on this site and deposits are charged straight to your own account — Booked takes no cut." Until every field has a value you will see Enter your keys below to start taking payments with this provider.

• 1Secret fields are write-only — once saved, the box shows •••••••• (leave blank to keep) and the value never comes back to your browser. Emptying the box does not erase the key; to replace it, paste a new one over the top.
• 2Every field counts — a provider is treated as connected only when all of its fields have a value. Leave one blank and Booked still shows the “enter your keys” prompt.
• 3Save keys — this card saves itself. The page’s own Save settings button does nothing for it, and pressing Save settings afterwards adds nothing.

Choosing External / manual asks for no keys at all — Booked records the booking and you take the money however you like: cash, a card machine, or your own gateway.

What Booked still does — and what it stops doing

Everything about scheduling carries on exactly as before. Only the money side changes.

To keep your figures honest, mark each appointment as paid once the money reaches you. Open the booking and, while it is unpaid, the payment dropdown offers Unpaid and Paid (cash / in person); a booking marked that way shows its method as Recorded manually and can be put back with Mark as unpaid. These marks feed the Taken this month and Paid in full figures on your Dashboard, so a branch that never records them looks as though it earns nothing.

Deposits need care

The Deposits card on Settings › Booking rules is locked until a payment method is ready — and saving your provider's keys unlocks it. That is the trap: unlocking the card does not mean Booked can collect the deposit.

• 1No payment step — the steps run Service, Date & time, Your details and stop. With Booked Payments a card step would follow; with your own provider it never appears.
• 2The deposit promise — this sentence comes from the service’s deposit rule, not from your payment set-up, so the customer is told about a £9.00 deposit that no one will ask them for.
• 3The confirm button — pressing it books the slot and finishes. The appointment lands in your diary marked unpaid.

Switching back to Booked Payments

The Booked Payments card stays at the top of the tab whatever you choose, so switching back is one click on Activate — it’s instant. If your account is not verified yet, the Set up payouts form opens straight away; balances, transactions, payouts and disputes appear only once that is finished, so an activated-but-unverified account looks almost empty.

Your saved provider keys are left where they are, so moving back and forth does not lose them. Switching either way takes effect the moment you click, with no confirmation — and any deposit rule you set while using your own provider will start being charged for real as soon as Booked Payments is verified.