Pay by Link Changed How We Think About Getting Paid. Here's Why It Works.

A guest calls to book a table for eight on Saturday night. You take the name, the time, the allergy note, and hang up. There's no deposit, no card on file, nothing to lose if they simply don't come. Multiply that phone call by every catering order taken over the counter and every invoice raised for a big event, and you start to see how much of hospitality still runs on trust.

Trust isn't a payment method. It doesn't stop a table sitting empty on your busiest night. It doesn't get an invoice paid inside 30 days. And it certainly doesn't work when the customer isn't standing in front of you with a card to tap.

Pay by Link changes that. It gives a business a way to take payment from someone who isn't there, without a terminal, without reading card numbers down a phone line, and without waiting weeks to see the money land. Here's why it has become one of the more useful pieces of a modern payment stack, and why the shift towards it isn't just a trend.

Where getting paid quietly breaks down

Phone orders are the obvious one. Someone calls to place a large takeaway or catering order, and the only way to take payment is to ask them to read their card number aloud, or to trust they'll pay on collection. Neither is comfortable. Reading a card down the phone puts you in awkward territory for compliance, and trusting a stranger to turn up with a card is how you end up with a fridge full of food nobody collects, the exact problem behind how Pay by Link speeds up payments for takeaways and phone orders.

Deposits are the second. A restaurant taking a Saturday night booking for ten has every reason to want money down before the table is confirmed. ResDiary's 2024 Hospitality Industry Report found that 76% of UK venues reported no-shows in 2023, with 8% of bookings simply not turning up, costing the average venue £3,621 in lost revenue that year alone. Without a way to take a card safely at the point of booking, most of that risk sits with the business.

Invoices are the third, and arguably the slowest bleed. A caterer or an events team sends an invoice for a large balance and then waits. UK small businesses are still owed an estimated £70.4 billion in unpaid invoices, according to Hiscox, and every day that money sits unpaid is a day it isn't in your account paying suppliers or staff.

What a link actually changes

A payment link does one thing well: it lets a customer pay from wherever they are, on whatever device they're holding, without you needing a card terminal in the room. You set the amount and a short reference such as "Table 4 deposit" or "Catering balance", then send it by text, email, WhatsApp or social message.

The customer taps the link, lands on a branded page carrying your name and logo rather than a generic gateway, and pays in seconds. No card details are read aloud or typed into an email. The payment settles into the same account as every other sale, so it shows up in your reporting alongside the counter, the kiosk and the website, not as a separate spreadsheet to reconcile by hand.

Kayana processes Pay by Link through Stripe, Mollie, Nevei and Ryft as part of its wider payment processing, so a business isn't tied to a single provider's rates. Every link is PCI-DSS compliant, handled to the same security standard as an in-person card terminal transaction, just without the terminal.

The maths of a link versus a chase

Deposits taken at the point of booking do more than protect revenue on paper. Card guarantees and deposits can cut no-show rates by 60 to 75%, according to Sully Booking's 2026 reservations guide, largely because a guest who has already committed money is a guest who shows up.

The same logic holds outside restaurants. One car rental operator using Kayana's Pay by Link to take deposits ahead of phone bookings reduced failed collections by 85%, simply because payment was confirmed before the booking was, not after. A charity collecting a pledge over the phone, a caterer confirming a deposit, and a dining venue securing a large party booking are all solving the same problem with the same tool.

Where it earns its place

Pay by Link tends to matter most wherever a business takes money without the customer standing in front of them. That covers phone pre-orders for coffee shops and cafes running events, deposits for bookings at restaurants, one-off balances for private hire, and remote donations for charities that can't rely on someone tapping a card in person.

It also suits subscription or repeat arrangements: venue hire paid in instalments, meal plans, or membership renewals, where sending a fresh link each time is far quicker than raising a new invoice from scratch.

None of this makes a payment link a replacement for a card terminal, a kiosk, or Tap to Pay for the moments a customer is standing right in front of you, and it's worth pairing with mobile tap-to-pay for the in-person side of the same small business. It's the piece that covers the gap those tools were never built for: the moment a customer isn't there to tap anything at all. Once that gap is closed, getting paid stops being something you chase after the fact, and becomes something you confirm before the work even starts.

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