You are a babysitter.
You are a bartender.
You are a photographer.
You made a bet with a friend over a football game.
All of these require payments. And while yes, you could take cash, sometimes it’s just easier with a credit card, as the money goes straight from their account to your account and you don’t have to deal with any of this green paper stuff.
Usually, you have to have one of those little thingies that they have at supermarkets with a single-purposed computer just for making a bill and accepting a credit card. But now, you can be on your way to accepting credit cards for a very small amount.
The key to this whole task is Square.
Square is completely free and consists of two parts: An app for your iPhone, android, or iPad, and the physical Square card reader.
Amazingly, the square card reader works with all of these. One model for android AND iPhone AND iPad. How you say? This picture should sum pretty much everything up.
So in case you didn’t figure it all out from that picture, basically the square is a little plastic thing that you plug into the headphone jack that has a slot that you can slide a credit card though. In the app, you can select how much you want to charge.
Now after you have put in an amount and swiped the card, you have to sign to authorize it. Of course that would usually be done with first a pen and paper, but now you can with a stylus on one of those thingamajigs in supermarkets. With square, you are supposed to use your finger on the touchscreen, but that can be hard as we are used to having pens. So that’s why in addition to your app and a reader, you need a pogo sketch to go along with it.
That should pretty much explain it.
Now after you are done with all of this swiping and signing and lolly-gagging, its time to print a receipt. I don’t think so. Instead, you can have the receipt emailed to a specified email address. cool, eh?
So wherever you are, at a wedding or the house of a small child, you can always accept credit cards and let people sign and get their receipts without ever seeing a piece of paper.