The questions bar owners ask.

A camera on the bar reads the signed merchant copy and takes the fields off it as data: the tip, the amount, the total, the check number, the auth code, the last four, the time and the server.

Then it checks the arithmetic — subtotal plus tip has to equal the total. Anything that does not reconcile is set aside with its photograph attached, for a person to look at. Nothing clears by guessing. See it read a slip on the bars page.

It refuses to guess. A misread tip is somebody's pay, so anything unreadable is set aside with its photograph and waits for a person. You clear it from the exceptions list; the rest of the stack has already cleared itself.

The honest answer here is also the strong one — a system that quietly invents a number is worse than one that hands you the ones it could not read.

If a read comes back containing a full number, the read is rejected and the extracted text is discarded — only the card brand and the last four are ever kept.

The photograph itself is held encrypted, because that image is what makes a dispute packet and a human review possible. Being outside the scope of the card-data rules is deliberate, and it is one-way once crossed.

Hours off the close. That is how bar staff describe the job it replaces — reading handwriting off a stack of paper and typing it into a terminal at the end of a shift, when everyone wants to go home.

We have not measured it at a real venue yet, and we will not print a figure until we have. When a pilot bar produces one, it will be theirs and it will be attributed to them.

An auth code and a search return the signed slip image, the transaction record and the adjustment timestamp as one packet — instead of somebody working through a shoebox with the clock running.

We cannot quote you a recovered figure. No venue has produced one yet, and until one does we will describe the mechanism rather than invent a result.

Yes. The cardholder name, the last four, the time, the server and a destroy-by date all come off the slip, so a caller reading out four digits gets an answer at the bar instead of a shrug. No card number is ever kept — the brand and the last four are all we hold.

The phone agent can run that lookup and take a message. It stops there: anything about what somebody was charged, or an open tab that needs closing out, goes to a person. That is a deliberate limit, not a missing feature.

Not something Vetra does. It reads the paper, reconciles it against the check and hands you a clean record of the night.

It does not pool, split, allocate or distribute anything, and it never decides what anyone is owed — that is your policy and your payroll, and it stays there.