Turning on card charging
The switch that lets money move at all — what it unlocks, and the trap in turning it off.
Card charging is the master switch for moving money at your studio. Until it is on, nothing in Dojo Tiger can take a payment — not staff, not families, not monthly billing. It starts off, and it stays off until somebody decides otherwise, so connecting Stripe never charges anyone by itself.
Where it is
Studio then General → Payments → Card charging, the first of the two switches under the connection status.
The checkbox is labelled Allow charging cards at this studio.
The one prerequisite
A connected Stripe account, showing as connected on the same card. That's it — card charging is the base gate and has nothing beneath it to depend on.
If Stripe isn't connected the checkbox is greyed out and a line underneath tells you why:
Connect Stripe first. Card charging is the switch that lets Dojo Tiger move money, and it needs a connected payment account before it can move any.
A studio on Square counts as not connected, because there is no Square integration to charge through.
Turning it on
Tick the box. That's the whole thing — there is no confirmation dialog, because turning it on charges nobody. It only makes the charge controls reachable; every individual payment is still something a person does deliberately.
What appears once it's on
| Where | What |
|---|---|
| A student's detail page | The Payments card, with Charge a card on file |
| A student's detail page | Refund buttons on settled rows of Charge history |
| A family's Payments page | Add a card, and Pay buttons for tuition and paid events |
| The settings card | The automatic monthly billing switch stops being blocked |
Note what does not appear: the Billing column on Students then Enrollments. That needs the second switch. See Turning on automatic monthly billing.
Families cannot add a card until this is on
The Add a card button on the family's page is gated on this switch, and so is everything that depends on having a card. If you plan to email families asking them to put a card on file, turn this on first — otherwise they arrive at a page that tells them the studio isn't accepting online payments yet.
Turning it off
Unticking the box opens a confirmation, and the confirmation is worth reading rather than clicking past. It says three things:
- Nobody at this studio will be able to charge a card through Dojo Tiger — not staff, not the online payment page, and not new monthly billing.
- This does not stop monthly billing that is already running. Subscriptions already set up keep charging families every month at Stripe, on Stripe's schedule.
- While card charging is off, staff also can't use the Stop monthly billing button — so families would keep being billed with no way to stop it from here.
Stop billing first, then turn this off
The stop-billing action is itself a charging operation, which is why this switch takes it down too. If any family is on monthly billing, stop each subscription from the Billing column on Students then Enrollments first, and only then turn card charging off.
If you have already turned it off and need to stop a subscription: turn card charging back on, stop the billing, then turn it off again.
If automatic monthly billing is also on, the dialog adds one more note: automatic monthly billing is not switched off with it, and starts working again the moment card charging comes back on. Switch it off separately if you don't want that.
Why the app warns instead of refusing
You might expect the app to block this while subscriptions are live. It deliberately doesn't. A kill switch that can refuse to switch off is not a kill switch — and the moment you most want one (money is going somewhere it shouldn't) is exactly the moment subscriptions are live.
So it tells you the consequence, in plain words, before you confirm, and then does what you asked.
Who can flip it
Owner and Admin. There is no narrower permission — an admin who can reach the settings page can turn card charging on and off, charge cards and issue refunds. See Who can do what.
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