A House Account and a Dummy Payment Method seem similar at first glance, but there are some important differences you should be aware of.

A Dummy Payment Method is essentially a placeholder for a real payment method. No payments will actually be processed with this, but it can be created to count towards income and/or revenue for your reporting. These payments are meant to represent a real payment that you're receiving in-studio. So for instance, if you accept Venmo or another payment method that cannot be processed through zingfit, you could request a Dummy "Venmo" Payment Method to be created for the Register. The customer Venmo's you for the purchase, and then you essentially log the purchase using the newly created payment method. Since there is no payment actually being processed by zingfit, we do not allow these to be displayed online - otherwise customers could use this to make purchases for free.

A House Account, on the other hand, will log the transaction as a debit on the customer's account, and keep track of the amount the customer owes to the studio. This way the studio can keep track of what is owed, and have customers pay it off when they come into the studio. This payment method can be used online, which makes it a great solution for studios who can't process regular payments through Stripe or Authorize.net.

The two can be used together as well. For example if you accept bank transfers in your studio, you can setup a House Account for customers to purchase things online, and then setup a Dummy Payment Method to represent the bank transfer so that customers can pay down their House Accounts. This way you aren't actually processing any payments through zingfit, but your customers can still make purchases online using the House Account, send you a bank transfer independently, and you can log the purchase properly in zingfit.