See the Number Before You Charge It: Manual Payments, Done Right
Not every guest pays by card — and your software should know that
In a lot of the world, the card-on-file model that booking software assumes simply isn’t how money moves. Your guests pay by bank transfer. They send M-Pesa or mobile money. They hand you cash at the door, or settle by PayPal. The card-everywhere assumption quietly leaves these markets out — and the hosts in them get tools that don’t fit how they actually get paid.
It gets worse when commission enters the picture. If you collect the money yourself, you need to tell the software what came in. And the moment a tool charges you a commission off the back of that, a fair question follows: how much, exactly, and when? Too many systems answer that question only after the charge has already landed.
Airflow does it the other way around. You record the real amount you received, and before anything is charged, you see the exact commission about to come off your card. You confirm it, or you don’t. Here’s how it works.
You set the methods you actually accept
Manual payments aren’t a single switch — they’re the methods that make sense in your market. In your connections settings, you turn on the ones you use and configure each:
- Bank transfer — add up to three bank accounts in different currencies. Guests pick which account to pay into, and if the booking currency differs from the account, the converted amount is shown automatically.
- M-Pesa / mobile money — add your provider and paybill or till number. Guests see it at checkout and pay straight from their phone.
- PayPal — add your PayPal email. The guest sends payment to it directly.
Each method has its own enable toggle, so you show guests only what you genuinely accept. You can also surface your contact details alongside the instructions, so a guest can reach you to confirm they’ve sent the money.
The point is that the guest pays you directly, through the channel you already use. Airflow isn’t sitting in the middle of that transfer. It’s keeping the record straight around it.
The guest gets clear payment instructions
When a guest reaches checkout and chooses one of your manual methods, they don’t get a dead end. They get the exact instructions for paying you — your bank details and the converted amount, your paybill number, or your PayPal address — right there on screen, with your contact details below if you’ve enabled them.
So the guest knows precisely where to send the money and how much. No back-and-forth emails to dig out account numbers. No guessing at the right amount when the currencies differ. The instructions are generated for that specific booking, in that specific currency.
You record the amount you actually received — not the amount you hoped for
This is the part most software gets wrong, and it matters more than it sounds.
When the money lands in your account, you open the booking and mark the payment received. Airflow pre-fills the expected amount — the deposit, or the full total — so the common case is one tap. But that field is editable, and that’s the whole point.
Bank transfers arrive light because the sending bank took a fee. A guest rounds down, or pays in a slightly different amount than quoted. Cash comes up short, or the guest pays part now and the rest later. In all of those cases, you type in what genuinely arrived — not a number the system insisted on.
Airflow records that real figure, updates the balance, and works out what’s still due. If the guest paid in full, the booking flips to fully paid. If they paid part of it, the booking shows the remaining balance and waits for the rest. Your records reflect the money that actually moved, because you told the software the truth instead of confirming a placeholder.
And before you confirm — you see the exact commission
Here’s the moment that defines the whole feature.
Because you’re the one marking the money received, you’re also the one triggering the commission charge. So before that charge happens, Airflow shows you a clear confirmation step with the exact commission amount about to be charged to your card on file. Not a percentage you have to do mental arithmetic on. The actual number, in the booking’s currency.
You see:
- The amount you’re recording as received.
- The commission about to be charged — the precise figure.
- A confirm button that does exactly, and only, what it says.
If it’s a partial payment, the popup tells you so, and shows you that the commission is being charged only on the amount received now — the rest comes later, as the balance is paid. If the commission for the booking has already been charged in full, it tells you that too, so you’re never double-charged by confirming again. And on a test or zero-value booking where there’s no commission, it says plainly that nothing will be charged.
Nothing comes off your card that you didn’t see first. There are no silent charges, no surprise line items at the end of the month, no “wait, what was that for?” That’s the rule, and the confirmation step is how we keep it.
Why this is the proportional-commission story, made visible
We recently changed how Airflow charges commission across the board: you pay it proportionally, on the money you’ve actually received, not on money you merely hope to collect. A deposit gets commission on the deposit; the balance gets commission on the balance; a guest who pays a deposit and vanishes never triggers a charge on the balance that never arrived. We wrote about the principle in detail in Commission on What You Collect, Not What You Hope to Collect.
Manual payments are where that principle becomes something you can see with your own eyes. On a card payment, the proportional commission happens automatically in the background and you never think about it. On a manual payment, you’re standing at the exact point where money becomes commission — so Airflow shows you the math, in full, and asks you to confirm it.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| Guest checks out | Picks your bank transfer, M-Pesa, or PayPal method and gets exact payment instructions. |
| Money arrives | You record the real amount received — editable, not a forced “expected” figure. |
| Before charging | Airflow shows the exact commission, proportional to this payment, and asks you to confirm. |
| You confirm | The commission is charged to your card, the balance updates, and a receipt link is available. |
The deposit-then-balance flow rides on top of this cleanly: confirm the deposit, see and approve the commission on the deposit; later, confirm the balance, see and approve the commission on the balance. We covered that full lifecycle in Deposit Now, Balance Later — and the Books Stay Right. This post is the piece that one promised: the manual side, where you see every number before it’s charged.
What this means if you run a cash or transfer business
If most of your guests pay by card, none of this is a feature you’ll think about much — and that’s fine. But if you operate in a market where bank transfer, mobile money, or cash is how business is actually done, this is the difference between software that fits and software that fights you.
- You accept the methods your guests really use, configured to your accounts.
- Guests get precise instructions, in the right currency, every time.
- You record what actually arrived, down to the cent — fees, shortfalls, partials and all.
- You see the commission before it’s charged, never after.
No spreadsheet to reconcile two transfers against one booking. No commission charged on a balance that hasn’t shown up. No charge you didn’t approve.
The principle we’re standing on
Manual payments are the setting where trust matters most, because you’re doing the bookkeeping by hand and the software is charging you on the back of it. So the commitment is simple, and we’ll say it plainly:
You record the real amount. You see the exact commission. Nothing is charged until you’ve seen the number and said yes.
That’s how manual payments should work — and it’s how they work in Airflow today, live now for bank transfer, M-Pesa and mobile money, and PayPal.
Want to see how the rest of the payment picture fits together? Read Commission on What You Collect and Deposit Now, Balance Later, or take a closer look at how Airflow handles direct bookings. If you’re not set up yet, get started here.
(Commission figures throughout are illustrative — your actual rate is whatever’s set on your account.)