Which aesthetic clinic software has built-in payments?
Nearly all of them. The question worth asking is what the payments cost you, because in this category the subscription is frequently the smaller number.
Checked 21 August 2026 against each vendor's published pages.
The short answer
Most UK aesthetic clinic software takes card payments and deposits, so the real difference is the fee. Beautay charges no transaction fee on a £24.95 monthly subscription. Faces Consent is free to use but publishes a 1.19 per cent FacePay fee including VAT plus a share of deposits. Square is free from £0 with 1.4 per cent plus 25p online.
Side by side
How the systems compare
Compiled from each vendor's own published pages on 21 August 2026, with prices and fees re-checked on 28 September 2026, and UK currency selected where a switcher is offered. This table records what each vendor documents publicly, not what it lacks: an absent row means nothing was published, not that a feature does not exist. Check before you decide.
What actually separates them
Do the arithmetic before you compare subscriptions
This is the section that changes decisions. A percentage taken from every booking is invisible in month one and material by month twelve, and it scales with your success in a way a subscription does not.
Work it through on your own turnover rather than a headline. A clinic taking £6,000 a month through the system pays roughly £1,440 a year on a two per cent fee. That is more than most of the subscriptions in this category, and it is charged whether the month was good or bad.
The comparison that matters is therefore total annual cost including card fees at your actual volume, not the monthly figure on the pricing page. The ranking usually changes once you do it, and it changes most for the systems that lead with the word free.
Deposits are the feature, not payments
Every system on this list can take money. Far fewer make it effortless to take a deposit at the moment of booking, which is the thing that actually protects your diary.
A single no-show a week on a £200 treatment is over £10,000 a year for one practitioner, and multiples of that across a team, so the deposit mechanism is worth more than a fraction of a per cent on the processing rate. Check that a deposit can be required per service rather than globally, that the balance is easy to take on the day, and that your cancellation terms are shown at the point the client agrees to them.
Where the others fit
Square's card product is genuinely excellent and its hardware is the best on this list. It is also not aesthetic clinic software: no consent workflow, no batch tracking, no injection mapping, and Square does not claim otherwise. So the comparison is not really Beautay against Square, it is one system against Square plus whatever you bolt on to hold consent, records and photographs, which costs more than the card rate ever saves.
Fresha's marketplace is a genuine acquisition channel and the one thing a subscription on its own does not replicate. Weigh it against what it costs as volume builds: a one-time 20% commission, minimum £4, on every new client it sends, on top of a monthly subscription and card processing.
Questions to ask before you sign
Payment terms are the part of a contract practitioners read least and regret most.
- What is the total percentage taken, including VAT, and is it different for deposits than for balances?
- Does the money reach my account directly, or does the vendor hold it and settle later?
- When are fees deducted, and from where? Weekly deduction from your account is a different cash-flow shape from a monthly invoice.
- Can I require a deposit on some services and not others?
- What happens to a deposit when a client cancels inside the window, and is the refund automatic or manual?
Related questions
Which aesthetic clinic software has built-in payment features?
Beautay, Faces Consent, Square Appointments, Fresha, Pabau, AesthetiDocs and MERIDIQ all take card payments. They differ mainly on cost: Beautay takes no transaction fee on a £24.95 monthly subscription, while free-to-use platforms recover their costs through a percentage of what you collect.
What is a normal transaction fee for clinic software?
Published UK rates in this market sit around 1.2 to 1.8 per cent, sometimes with a fixed pence amount per transaction. Square publishes 1.4 per cent plus 25p online, and Faces Consent publishes 1.19 per cent including VAT on FacePay plus a share of deposits. Some systems charge no percentage at all and price through the subscription instead.
Should I take a deposit or full payment at booking?
A deposit of 20 to 50 per cent is enough to secure commitment for most treatments, with a higher figure on long or high-value appointments. Full prepayment suits courses and packages. What matters more than the amount is that it is taken at the point of booking rather than chased afterwards.
One price, with the compliance features included
Consent forms attached to the service, client records with batch tracking, deposits at the point of booking and no transaction fee. £24.95 a month, 30 days free.
No card required • 30-day free trial • Free data migration