You ring the items on the camp store register, choose charge to site, and pick the reservation. The charge posts as a line on that guest's folio and settles at checkout with the nightly rate. Cash, card, guest credit, and split payments work the same way, and tracked stock comes off the count as the order is created, so the last two bundles of firewood can't be sold twice.
It's 4:41 on a Tuesday. The couple in site 22 walks into the store for a bag of ice, decides on firewood while they're at it, and the woman holds up a t-shirt in her size. They left their wallet in the truck. She asks the question every camp store gets forty times a week: can you put it on the site?
You can. The clerk taps the three items, picks charge to site, finds site 22, and hands over the bag. The charge lands on that reservation's folio and settles at checkout with the nightly rate, the pet fee, and everything else. Total time at the counter: about twenty seconds.
What's on the register screen?
The register is the full width of the screen, because a store counter is not the place to hunt through menus. Your products sit in the categories you named: firewood, ice, camp supplies, apparel, whatever you actually sell. Tap to add, tap again for a second bundle, and the cart on the right totals as you go with tax figured on each line's own rate.
Every item is a product you can see and edit: price, tax rate, category, SKU, whether it tracks stock, and whether it's still active. The same product record is what a guest sees if you let them order firewood from their phone, and what a guest sees at online checkout if you offer it as an add-on. You keep one catalog rather than three lists that drift apart by August.
How can a guest pay at the camp store?
The tender step is where a camp store differs from a gift shop. You get four:
- Cash. Enter what they handed you, the screen shows the change, and the amount lands in the drawer math for the shift.
- Card. The sale goes to a card reader on the counter, or to a phone if you're taking payment out on the grounds.
- Guest credit. The balance a guest already holds with your park, applied at the register and drawn down on the ledger.
- Charge to site. A line on the reservation's folio, settled with the rest of the stay.
One order can also split across more than one of those at the same time. Twenty dollars cash and the rest on a card is a normal Saturday, and it doesn't require two orders or a workaround.
What goes wrong at a busy counter?
Retail at a campground breaks in two specific places, and both of them happen when the counter is busy.
Can two clerks oversell the last bundle?
The first is stock. If two clerks ring the last two bundles of firewood at the same moment, a lot of systems let both sales through and leave you at negative one, which you discover the next morning when the count doesn't match and nobody remembers which sale was real.
Stock comes off the count as part of creating the order, not afterward, and the update is conditional on the quantity actually being there. If the bundles are gone, the sale stops and says so, and the order rolls back rather than posting a sale you can't fill. Every movement lands in a stock ledger with the amount, the reason, the balance after, and who did it. When you receive a pallet of firewood or adjust for a damaged case, that's a line in the same ledger.
What happens if a clerk taps settle twice?
The other is the double charge. A clerk taps settle, the screen hesitates for a second on park wifi, and the clerk taps again. Every tender path locks the order row and re-checks that it's still open inside the same transaction, so the second tap finds an order that's already settled and does nothing. The guest gets charged once. Guest-placed orders carry their own key for the same reason, so a guest refreshing the confirmation page never buys firewood twice.
A double charge you catch is an apology. A double charge you don't catch is a chargeback with your park's name on it.
When do you void a sale instead of refunding it?
An order that hasn't been paid yet can be voided. The order cancels, the stock goes back on the count, and the void is recorded rather than erased. If the sale was already settled, that's a refund instead, which is its own path with its own rules and its own history. The distinction matters at month end, and it's worth teaching once at the counter: if the money moved, it's a refund.
Where does a charge to site end up?
By the time the couple in site 22 checks out on Thursday, the ice, the firewood, and the t-shirt are three lines on their folio under the nightly rate. They pay once. Store sales show up in the day's numbers by tender and by surface, so you can see what the counter took in cash against what the guests charged to their sites, and the sale is sitting in your order history with the receipt, the line items, and the clerk's name if anyone asks.