Getting paid with a QR that carries the amount

«How do I pay you?» is probably the message you receive most often. And the usual answer — bank details written into a chat, or read out over the phone — is one of the few points in the day where money can genuinely go missing.

Why bank details written by hand are a problem

An IBAN is twenty-seven characters of letters and numbers. Whoever copies it by hand from a message gets it wrong more often than you would think, and when they do, one of two things happens: the transfer bounces back days later, or it does not come back at all.

Then there is the amount. If the customer types it, sooner or later the round figure turns up instead of the exact one, or the quote's total instead of the receipt's. And chasing twenty euros costs more than twenty euros of your time.

What a payment QR does

The QR is not a new way of paying: it is a way of making nobody type anything. Inside it are your account details and the amount, already there. The customer scans it, their banking app opens with the fields filled, they see your name and the figure, and they confirm.

From there on it is an ordinary bank transfer, with the same guarantees as always.

The money goes from their bank to yours. It does not pass through us and it does not pass through an intermediate service.

That is the point worth understanding, because it is the part that protects you: there is no holding account where the money can sit, no commission taking a slice, and no «payment being processed» to explain to the customer.

The detail that changes things

A static QR — the one printed and stuck up beside the till — only says where to send the money. The customer still types the amount, so the second problem remains untouched.

A QR generated on the document carries the calculated total as well. That is the difference between removing one error out of two and removing both.

How it works in Yataio

The QR can go at the bottom of a document, or be generated on its own when you need paying straight away without creating a receipt. Either way it carries the amount inside.

Two things to know, said plainly:

• it is a paid-plan feature, not part of the free tier;
• the type of QR depends on the country you chose at first launch: it is the country that decides which payment standard the app can build.

The rest — including the scams that circulate around payments and how to spot them — is in the guide. If your problem is further upstream, namely keeping track of who has not paid yet, I wrote about that here.