How to Set Up a Compliant Cash Discount Program on Clover
A cash discount program lives or dies in the setup. The concept is legal in Louisiana. A specific register, configured a specific way, is what actually has to hold up, especially now that Act 751 has turned debit card fees from a card brand violation into a state law violation.
We set these programs up on Clover across South Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. Here is the checklist we actually run, and the mistakes we fix most often on systems other people installed.
The setup checklist
1. Price from the regular price, not the low price. This is the foundational decision. Your item prices in Clover should be the posted regular price, the one a card customer pays. The cash discount comes off that number at the register. Systems built the other way, where a fee grows the total at checkout, are running surcharge math, and on debit cards that is exactly what Louisiana now prohibits.
2. Configure the discount, not a fee. Clover needs to apply a discount on cash transactions. If your current setup uses a "service fee," "non-cash adjustment," or similar add-on line item on card payments, the naming alone tells you which direction the math runs.
3. Make the receipts tell the story. A cash customer's receipt should show the regular price and the discount they received. A card customer's receipt should show the posted price, cleanly, with no added lines. When we audit a troubled setup, receipts are usually where the problem shows first.
4. Post the signage. Customers should learn about your pricing at the door and at the register, not at the payment screen. Clear signage is not decoration, it is a load-bearing part of the program.
5. Test with a real debit card. Before we leave any installation, we ring up a sale and pay with a debit card. What the terminal does in that moment is the whole point. If a fee appears, nothing else on this list matters yet.
6. Train the staff answer. Your team needs one sentence for the customer who asks: "Our posted prices are our regular prices, and we offer a discount if you pay cash." Confident and true beats improvised every time.
The mistakes we fix most often
- Programs sold as cash discounts that were configured as surcharges on day one and never checked again.
- Old signage quoting fee percentages that no longer match the register.
- A second terminal or online ordering channel that was never brought into the program, so it behaves differently from the counter.
- Menus reprinted with the low price, which quietly turns the whole program back into add-on math.
Get it set up right, or get it checked
If you are starting fresh, we will build the whole thing: the right Clover hardware, the pricing structure, receipts, signage, and staff walkthrough. If you already have a program and this article gave you a bad feeling, that is worth a twenty-minute check, and we back our own setups with our Compliance Guarantee.
Either way, the law itself is worth understanding firsthand. We keep a free plain-English guide at act751.com. And when you are ready, we are local and easy to reach.