Maybe this feels familiar. It’s the end of a hard week keeping your pub running smoothly and you’re going to relax with… A spreadsheet.

But what choice do you have? The week’s takings aren’t adding up as they should be. One dashboard doesn’t match the other. And somewhere between the rows of payments, refunds, and chargebacks lies the truth about how your business is doing. Somewhere.

If there’s one thing I see pub owners and operators struggling with more than anything, it’s the unspoken overhead of just keeping things ticking over. It’s the late nights spent scanning statements from different platforms. It’s the unpaid overtime spent on payment reconciliation, invoices and cashflow management. It’s the death-by-a-thousand-spreadsheets that keeps you away from the core work of running your business.

A better way to manage your payments

Now let’s be clear, I’m not trying to sell you a silver bullet to your payments and reconciliation admin. But what I will say is that, at DNA Payments, we do things differently from your run-of-the-mill payments company. Yes, we offer industry-leading payment terminals that make it easy for punters to pay for their pint. We’re talking modern, wireless payment terminals, that support all major card payment methods.

But the real benefits that we hear from publicans aren’t behind the bar. It’s about being able to shut down the laptop, step away from the spreadsheets and get more time back from their working day.

That’s a big claim. So how do we do it?

Firstly, it’s from how we’re built as a business. Many payment companies will rely on a third-party card acquirer behind the scenes to handle your payments; they just act as the front-of-house. We’re a one-stop shop, with everything you need available in one place. That gives us more control over our pricing, because we’re not baking in the margins of another business into our fees. It also means that all your payments and fees are unified in a single place and are all accessible through our Merchant Portal Dashboard. It sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how rare it is for payments companies in our space to handle everything internally rather than using a third-party.

We should probably talk about our Merchant Portal. It’s your single point of entry for every payment your business handles and does the heavy lifting to simplify your reporting. It’s designed to make it easy to see the health of your cashflow and status of every payment, right down to the single bag of pork scratchings you sold at 5.12pm last Saturday.

For your typical pub, that means we can significantly simplify their reporting and administration. They can see all their card payments from a single night in one place, along with detailed breakdowns of when those payments will be settled to their bank account and all their refunds and chargebacks. It also means every charge and fee is visible in their Merchant Portal – something we’re always working to make as clear and easy to understand as possible.

And if you’re always on the go, the Merchant Portal is also available as an app on your phone or tablet, as well as through any web-connected device. So if, for whatever reason, you needed to check your payment status while you’re pouring a pint, you can access everything from your phone with a few taps (kids, don’t try this at home).

Payments, with all the trimmings 

Alongside our core reporting suite, we also offer a range of other tools to help manage your business more easily. If you often handle large one-off bookings, you can generate payment links from within your Merchant Portal. A payment link does what it says on the tin – it’s a regular web URL that you can put in an email, send over WhatsApp or add to an invoice to help you get paid faster.

When someone receives a payment link, they just click it, enter their card details, and the payment is sent to you. It’s the ideal set-up for venue reservations, large bookings or any time you need someone to pay you who isn’t stood in your pub with their card in their hand.

Lastly, payments are central to our business, but it’s not all we do. Zash is our ePOS system, made for hospitality. It lets you take orders, send food orders to your kitchen, drinks to the bar, and handle payments all in one place. With built-in QR codes, your regulars can even order directly from their table without going up to the bar. Running on a handheld payment terminal, a full till system, or any internet-connected device you choose, it’s the only software you need to keep your pub running smoothly.

The public house always wins

We’ve covered a lot of ground here, and yes, there’s plenty to think about if you’re taking a step back to look at how you could cut some of the layers of admin from your week. Here’s the thing – I’m not here to put on the hard sell for DNA Payments. We pride ourselves on having a wide range of tools and functionality, that doesn’t mean all of it is going to be right for your pub. But if you do want to start looking at whether there’s a better way to run your business, simplify your reporting and maybe even get your Sunday evenings back, give me a call and we’ll see what we can do for you.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2026 Edition of BII News.