Mixed tender is an everyday event, not an exception: a guest with 200 on a stored-value card and a 340 bill, a group where one person has cash and another has a card, a regular who wants to clear the coins in their pocket first.
How it settles
Add tenders to the bill until it is covered. The system tracks the remaining balance as each one goes on, so the cashier is never doing arithmetic in their head at the counter. When the total is met the bill closes and, if cash was involved, the change is calculated and the drawer opens.
Coupons, member pricing and discounts are applied before tendering, so the amount being collected is already the final one — no mental adjustment at the last step.
The one hard rule
You cannot overpay with an electronic tender. Cash can exceed the balance because you can hand back the difference; a card charge or a stored-value deduction cannot, because there is no mechanism to return the excess. So the system caps electronic tenders at the outstanding balance. This is a constraint of reality rather than a design choice, but it surprises people who expect to charge a round number to the card and take the difference in cash.
Rounding and small change
Some currencies no longer have the small denominations their prices imply. If the smallest note or coin in real circulation is larger than your smallest price increment, cash totals need rounding to something the drawer can actually pay — and that rounding should be a configured rule, not a decision the cashier makes at the counter. Configured, it is consistent and it reconciles; left to the cashier, you have a different answer per person and a permanent small variance in the day.
Currency decimal places are set per store for the same reason — three decimals where the currency uses them, none where it does not.
Terminals
If your card machine is integrated with the till, the amount goes across and comes back as an authorised payment. If it is a standalone unit, the cashier keys the amount into the terminal and records the tender in the till — workable, but it means the two must be reconciled daily rather than weekly, and it is where tips taken on the terminal go missing from your books. See end-of-day cash-up.
Which local payment channels can be integrated depends entirely on your country. We have real integrations with a number of regional providers, and none at all in some markets. Tell us where the shop is and we will say which applies rather than answering “we support everything”.
