External Card is the payment method for a card you ran somewhere other than Manifold Pay: your own terminal, or your processor's website. It is offered on invoices whenever you have answered Yes to "Do you run cards on any processor other than Manifold Pay?" under Settings > Payments (and until you have answered at all). Manifold treats the transaction as something that happened outside the POS: you run the card on your processor, and when it approves you come back to the invoice and record the payment.

What Manifold captures for each External Card payment

  • The amount and date, same as any payment. In reports it is grouped under Credit Card with every other card payment.
  • Optionally: Card brand (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover), Card last 4 digits, and Auth code from your processor. None required. These fields appear under the composer row when you pick External Card, once you have answered Yes and named your processor.
  • Automatically: your processor name (the one you picked under Settings > Payments) is stamped onto the payment as its source. You do not retype it per payment. Whether you ticked "I run cards on a physical terminal in the shop" decides whether the payment is tagged External Card (terminal) or External Card (online gateway).

Where it shows up

  • In Payment History on the invoice, the row reads "External Card (Visa ●●●●1234) via Square", with the auth code in the Reference column.
  • On the printed and emailed invoice, the payment row reads "Credit card (Visa ●●●●1234) via Square".
  • On the Payments list page (the top-level Payments page in the sidebar), the Processor column shows the name, and the Source filter can pull only External Card (terminal), only External Card (online gateway), only Manifold Pay, and so on.
  • On the Payments by Method report, the "Reconciliation by Processor" table breaks Credit Card totals down by source and processor name, so you can match each line to that processor's daily settlement statement.

If you ever change processors, historical payment rows keep their original processor name; only new payments pick up the new one. A card taken on the Manifold Pay terminal is never External Card; it is recorded as Manifold Pay automatically.