Ask customers to authorise card charges at checkout

Settings → Declarations. Off until you switch it on, and set per business.

A declaration is a tick-box the customer must accept on the payment step before they can pay. It is separate from your rental terms: the terms are a document they agree to, declarations are individual permissions recorded one by one, so you can point at the exact sentence someone accepted.

This is the paperwork behind charging a card later. If you place a bond, or bill for fuel, cleaning, tolls, road user charges, infringements or extra kilometres after a hire, the card authorisation group is where the customer gives you permission to do it.

Before you start

Set your bond amount first, since the card authorisation wording refers to it. See Set up and release bonds.

Have your privacy statement's web address to hand if you want to use the privacy declaration.

Where to find it

In the left sidebar open Settings, then Declarations under Business. It is not a sidebar item of its own, so look on the settings page rather than in the menu. It is owner-only, and a manager will not see it at all.

What you can switch on

Card authorisation

Two tick-boxes, both required together when the group is on:

• permission to hold the bond on their card and charge it for loss or damage they are responsible for;
• permission to charge the card after the hire for what they owe — fuel, cleaning, tolls, road user charges, traffic and parking infringements, and distance beyond any included allowance.

You cannot edit this wording. These are compliance-sensitive statements, so Glovebox owns the words and you own the switch. The only thing that changes is your name, taken from your workspace name — so if that reads oddly to a customer, fix it there and every declaration follows.

If you take a bond, the settings page will recommend switching this on.

Privacy

One tick-box confirming the customer has read and agrees to your privacy statement, with a link to it.

It stays inactive until you paste a URL in, whatever the toggle says. That is deliberate: a privacy confirmation with nothing to read is worse than not asking. Leave the URL blank and the tick-box simply does not appear.

Your own declarations

You can add up to four of your own — a code of conduct, an off-road policy, an age or licence condition, anything a customer should confirm. Each one needs a sentence and a link to a page on your website.

Four is a deliberate cap. A checkout with a dozen tick-boxes converts badly.

A row only reaches a customer once it has both a sentence and a link. A half-finished row is skipped rather than shown broken.

You can write {operator_name} in your own wording and it is replaced with your workspace name, the same way the platform ones work.

Steps

1. Turn on Card authorisation if you take a bond or charge anything after a hire.
2. Turn on Privacy and paste the full web address of your privacy statement, including https://.
3. Add your own if you need them: Add a confirmation, then write the sentence, paste the link, and give the link a label like "Read the policy".
4. Click Save.

What the customer sees

On the last step of booking, above the pay button, a card headed Before you pay holds your rental terms and every active declaration together, so it reads as one consent section rather than tick-boxes scattered through the form. They cannot pay until each one is ticked.

What gets recorded

Each accepted declaration is stored against the booking with the time and the customer's IP address, and the exact wording is snapshotted — so changing your privacy URL next year does not rewrite what someone agreed to last year. Accepted declarations are printed on the rental agreement PDF under DECLARATIONS.

Change a setting and Glovebox starts a new version from that point. Bookings already taken keep the version they accepted.

Things worth knowing

• Only bookings made on your website capture declarations. A booking you enter yourself over the phone or at the counter does not go through the payment step, so nothing is ticked. Its readiness panel will show Declarations · Not yet accepted and stay that way.
• That tile never blocks a pickup. It counts toward the warnings on the booking, but the handover is not gated on it. If you need the permission for a phone booking, take it the way you did before Glovebox.
• Imported bookings are marked "no declarations captured", not chased, since they were made in another system.
• Bookings taken before you switched declarations on are flagged as predating the feature rather than reported as missing, so you do not get a wall of false warnings on your existing diary. Your Glovebox contact runs declarations:backfill once to do this.
• Turning a group off stops asking new customers. It does not remove what earlier customers accepted.

Still stuck

If a declaration is not showing at checkout, the usual causes are the group being off, the privacy URL being blank, or a custom row missing its link. If the wording is wrong for your business, tell us — the platform declarations are not operator-editable by design.