Guide
A meal programme, without a canteen or an HR project
Feeding people at work usually fails on one of two things: nobody wants to run a canteen, and nobody wants to process meal receipts. A restricted balance on a Wallet card avoids both, provided the restrictions are set up properly.
Updated
At a glance
- Setup time
- About a week, most of it talking to venues
- Restrictions
- Venues, categories, weekdays, hours
- Funding
- Employer, employee, or both
- Plan
- Commercial accounts from Scale
Updated
Get the restrictions right first
In most jurisdictions a meal allowance that can be spent on anything is treated as pay, and taxed accordingly. One restricted to food, on working days, at named venues, usually is not — check the local position before designing the programme, because it shapes every other decision.
The restrictions therefore need to be enforced at the point of sale rather than checked afterwards. A purchase that should not have happened is a tax problem if it happens and is reimbursed, and no problem at all if it is declined at the till.
That is what Smart Account Detection does: the rules of the account paying are applied at authorisation, so an ineligible purchase never completes.
- Talk to the venues before the employees — the programme is only as good as the list.
- Let employees top up the same card with their own money; it removes the awkwardness of a limit.
- Decide up front whether unused balance rolls over or expires.
The sequence
- 01
Check the local tax position
It determines the restrictions, and the restrictions determine everything else.
- 02
Sign up the venues
The cafés and restaurants near the office that will take the card.
- 03
Set the rules
Amount, period, weekdays, hours and the venue allow-list.
- 04
Load the employees
From the HR system by API or file; cards go out by SMS or email.
- 05
Fund on a schedule
Monthly or on payday, automatically, with no manual step.
- 06
Review after a month
Uptake, average spend and which venues are actually used.
Decisions to make
- Amount
- Per day or per month, per employee or per group
- Roll-over
- Carry unused balance, or expire it at period end
- Employee top-up
- Allowed on the same card, or not
- Venue list
- Fixed, or extended on request
- Leavers
- Cards suspended instantly from the panel or API
- Reporting
- Per employee, per venue, per period
Questions about this
What is a closed-loop payment platform?
It lets you issue and process payments inside your own ecosystem — gift cards, prepaid balances, employee accounts — without routing every transaction through Visa, Mastercard or a bank. The funds stay in your system, so the fees, the data and the customer experience are yours to set.
Do my customers need to install an app?
No. Cards issue straight to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, which are already on every phone. The customer scans a QR code with the camera, taps “Add to Wallet”, and the card is there in about ten seconds. No download, no account, no registration form.
Does it work with my existing POS terminal?
Yes. The cashier enters the amount on the terminal you already run, the terminal shows a QR code, and the customer scans it with their own phone. That works on any terminal that can draw a QR on screen, which covers modern PAX, Verifone and Ingenico fleets. If there is no terminal at all, staff can run the same flow from a phone.
Do you handle online payments too, or just POS?
Both, on one balance. There is a checkout widget for merchant sites and a direct embedding into PSP gateways as a payment method. One admin panel, one transaction ledger, one reporting stream — offline and online together.
How does 7Konto embed into a PSP checkout?
7Konto appears as a new payment method inside your existing checkout, next to the cards and wallets you already offer. Every merchant on that gateway sees “Pay with 7Konto” without changing a line on their own site: we integrate once with the gateway, and the whole portfolio has it.
Set up a meal programme in about a week
A free 30-day pilot, configured and supported by our team.