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How it all fits together

Purpose: Show how the three parts of the platform connect, so the rest of these procedures make sense.

When to use this: Read it once before you start, and come back to it whenever you are not sure which section a task belongs in.

The short version

Payments are taken in two places, the workstation at the counter and the handheld in someone's hand. Both report up to the cloud portal, where you see and reconcile everything. The cloud portal also holds the configuration for each device, which the workstation and handheld pull back down.

        TAKE PAYMENTS                         SEE & RECONCILE
┌──────────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────────────┐
│ Workstation │ ── report ─▶│ │
│ (counter / fixed) │ │ Cloud Portal │
├──────────────────────┤ │ transactions, batches, │
│ Handheld │ ── report ─▶│ reconciliation, reports │
│ (in hand / mobile) │ │ │
└──────────────────────┘ └──────────────────────────┘
▲ ▲ │
│ └───────── pull config ─────────────┤
└──────────────── pull config ───────────┘
(Merchant ID, secure device, com mode,
tip presets, mobile terminal, routing)

This is the spine of the site:

  1. A payment is taken at the workstation or the handheld.
  2. It reports up to the cloud portal, where it appears in Transactions and gets reconciled against the processor.
  3. The cloud portal provisions the configs, the settings each device needs, and the workstation and handheld pull those configs down when they reload.

Where each task lives

You want to…Go to
Install or reinstall the counter payment serviceWorkstation · Install & reinstall
Reload a device's settings, push its offline transactions, reset a terminalWorkstation · Daily procedures and Handheld · Push offline transactions
Use a handheld as the terminal for a counterHandheld · Mobile Terminal modeWorkstation · Mobile Terminal
Look at sales, close a batch, reconcile the weekCloud · Transactions & reconciliation
Create or change the settings a device pulls downCloud · Provisioning configs
Let guests order and pay from a QR code, or charge to a roomCloud · Order & Pay / QR and Cloud · Charge to room

The one rule that ties devices to the cloud

A device only works when its cloud config matches the device. Three values do the most damage when they are wrong, and all three are set in the cloud portal:

  • Workstation Name must equal the machine's Windows hostname, or the workstation service won't start. See Provisioning and Install & reinstall.
  • Secure Device must match the actual reader model, or handhelds stop working. See Provisioning.
  • Com mode must match how the reader is connected, or payments stop. See Provisioning.

See also

Vitabyte

Vitabyte Documentation

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