ID Verification - No more faxed IDs

September 1, 2026

If you've run a front desk or a banquet booking desk, you know the drill for a phone reservation or a big deposit: ask the guest to fax or email over a photo of their driver's license and a signed credit card authorization form, the kind with the full card number written out by hand. It's how the industry has confirmed "this is really you, and you really authorized this charge" for decades. It's also a pile of the two most sensitive things a business can hold (a government ID and a full card number) sitting in an inbox or a fax log, usually forever, usually with nobody quite sure who's allowed to see it.

We built ID Verification to replace that, not to bolt another form onto it.

What it does

From any folio, a team member can click Request ID Verification for the payer, or for the guest too, when the guest isn't the same person as the payer (an assistant booking rooms for someone else, a company AP department paying for a stay). Folio Anywhere sends that person a link. They open it, scan their ID, take a selfie, and they're done. That's it: no account to create, no app to download, nothing to install.

Under the hood it's Stripe Identity, the same document-and-selfie matching Stripe uses for its own platform, running on our existing Stripe relationship. Staff just see a status: Pending, Verified, or Failed, plus the verified name, document type, and issuing country once it's done.

No card number is ever part of an ID verification. It answers "is this person who they claim to be," not "can we charge this card." Those stay two separate, purpose-built checks.

Built for repeat guests, not just one-off checks

A payer or guest you've already verified doesn't have to go through it again every time they book. If someone comes back for a second stay, the folio shows a Reuse (no charge) option instead of a new request: same verified identity, no new Stripe session, no new fee. It's scoped to your business only; nobody else's prior verification of that person ever shows up on your folios.

What it costs

ID Verification is an opt-in add-on for Pro and Enterprise plans, off by default. A business owner turns it on in Settings > Business, and each verification your team actually requests adds a small usage fee to that business's invoice, separate from your Pro subscription, billed whether the check passes or fails, since that's how Stripe bills us for running it. Before you confirm, the toggle shows you the exact per-verification price that'll land on your invoice, so there's no guessing.

Reused verifications are free: you're only ever billed the first time a given person is actually checked.

Less paperwork, less PCI exposure

The old fax-and-email workflow doesn't just feel dated: it's a real compliance liability. A signed authorization form with a card number on it is cardholder data, full stop, and once it's a photo in someone's inbox or a page in a fax log, it's sitting outside any system built to protect it: no encryption at rest, no access controls, no retention policy, no way to prove who looked at it or when.

ID Verification sidesteps that by design:

• We never ask for a card number to confirm identity. The verification and the payment are two different flows on two different systems: Stripe Identity for "who are you," Stripe or Square's own hosted card fields for "here's my card." Nothing about identity verification touches or captures payment data.
• We never store the ID document or the selfie. Stripe retains those under its own retention policy (not ours), and we only keep the safe summary Stripe hands back: verified name, document type, issuing country, and the date. No document images, no ID numbers, live in our database, ever.
• Access to the actual photo is deliberately narrow. When staff do need to eyeball the ID against the person (owners and managers only, not every team member), the viewer mints a link straight from Stripe that expires in 30 seconds and is never downloaded or stored by us. It's a look, not a copy.
• Turning the add-on off cleans up after itself. Canceling ID Verification redacts every verification session we're still holding a reference to at Stripe, on top of Stripe's own default retention window.

Put together: instead of a fax machine's worth of driver's licenses and handwritten card numbers scattered across inboxes with no policy behind them, you get a purpose-built check that answers exactly one question, keeps almost nothing on file, and puts what little it does keep behind real access controls.

Getting started

If you're on Pro or Enterprise and connected to Stripe, head to Settings > Business to turn ID Verification on. (It's a Stripe-only add-on for now; if you're connected to Square, you'll see that noted on the payments page.) Once it's on, any team member can request a verification straight from a folio: no extra setup, no new login for your guest, just a link and a couple of minutes.