Everything you need to know about Benson’s integration with point-of-sale system iKentoo.
Setting up iKentoo
To get started on integrating your iKentoo account of Benson, make sure you have the following information from iKentoo:
- Your username and email address for iKentoo
- Your Business Location ID from iKentoo that will be linked to your property on Benson.
- A list of Payment Methods from iKentoo that will determine which bills are sent into Benson.
Once you’ve got these important details on-hand, head over to the “Integrations” section in Benson and open up the iKentoo card.
You’ll immediately see the four essential fields that you need to capture up-front: your iKentoo username and password, your Business Location ID and the Period Start Day. The Period Start Day will determine from what date Benson will start fetching bills from iKentoo. Capture these fields with the information you have and then head over to the “Company Map” section.
Benson splits an iKentoo bill into three specific parts: the payment part, the gratuity part (if applicable) and the actual charge part for all items on the bill. Therefore, you’ll need to map your Benson Payment Types to the payment methods you’ve set up on your iKentoo bill as well as your Benson Charge Types to the charge types you’ve got on iKentoo.
For example, if your iKentoo system accepts credit card payments, then you’ll be mapping the “credit card” payment method from iKentoo to the “Credit Card” Payment Type you would have created on Benson.
However, your first requirement will be to specify which Charge Type on Benson you’d like your iKentoo bills to automatically fall into. Since Benson accepts all charges on the bill as a single, totalled item, you may map, for example, a “Restaurant” Charge Type from Benson as your Default Charge Type.
When it comes to any Gratuity amounts on the iKentoo bill, these will be pulled out by Benson and slotted into their own Charge Type. For example, you may want all gratuity amounts on the iKentoo bill to go to a “Restaurant Gratuity” Charge Type on Benson. You can select which Charge Types these should go to by using the “Gratuity Charge Type” drop-down list.
Since your restaurant customers may be able to pay their bills in multiple ways, you’ll be able to capture and map as many Payment Types as you like between iKentoo and Benson.
You’ll use the “Their Field” drop-down to select Payment Type and then use the “Select Value” drop-down list to capture the relevant Payment Type from Benson. iKentoo will have a code or name to represent this payment type, and this gets captured in the “Map Value” field.
Lastly, while you are able to send all charges from an iKentoo bill as a single, lump sum to one of Benson’s Charge Types, you can map more if you would like to split things up a bit. For example, you can split your iKentoo bill charges into “Food” and “Beverage” by creating these two Charge Types on Benson and then mapping them to their relevant partner in iKentoo. While this isn’t necessary, the option is available.
Once you’ve got all of this etup out the way, you’re ready to go and activate the integration between Benson and iKentoo.
Assigning Bills from iKentoo to Benson
With the integration setup and activated, you’ll find an iKentoo icon on the Front Desk section of the system. By clicking on this card, you’ll get a view of all bills coming in from iKentoo into Benson. You can assign bills here to invoices.
Payment Methods and Filtering Bills
You may not want every single bill from iKentoo to be pulled into Benson, so Benson will only pull in bills that have certain Payment Methods mapped to Benson.
For example, let’s say you have a bill from iKentoo that you’d like to have assigned to a Room in a Reservation on Benson. The Payment Method used in iKentoo on this bill is called “BENSON”. On Benson’s side, you will have listed “BENSON” as an accepted Payment Method from iKentoo. This bill will be pulled through and assigned.
It’s important to keep in mind that Benson will only fetch bills that have a particular Payment Method listed in the iKentoo setup. These Payment Methods are captured in the iKentoo setup of Benson in the box titled “Payment Methods”. You can capture more than one by separating each with a semi-colon. Remember to make sure that the Payment Methods listed in Benson have the exact spelling as spacing as they do on iKentoo.