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SAFE Billing PlatformDocs

Payment Methods

Three views covering how your customers pay you, and what to do about the ones who have no way to.

Direct Debit mandates

Section titled “Direct Debit mandates”

Columns are the customer, your reference and their mandate reference, the status, when it was set up and the provider’s own status.

Filter by Any status, Active, Pending or Ended.

A mandate pending for more than seven days is tagged Stuck pending, which usually means something needs chasing with the bank or the customer.

Payment cards

Section titled “Payment cards”

Columns are the customer, the cardholder, the masked card number, the expiry, the status and when it was set up.

Filter by Any status, Active, Expiring soon or Ended. Expiring soon means an active card whose expiry falls within the next 60 days, which is the window that gives you time to ask for a new one before a collection fails.

No auto-collection

Section titled “No auto-collection”

The worklist that turns the other two views into work: customers owing money on raised invoices with no active mandate and no stored card. These are the accounts to move onto automatic collection.

Columns are the customer, account number, what they owe and the oldest due date, then two actions.

Section titled “Payment links”

Generates the customer’s no-login MyAccount links for making a payment and for setting up a card or Direct Debit, ready to send them.

Important: this only appears where the customer has a MyAccount profile. Where the cell is empty, the customer has no profile - a data condition, not a permission one.

The same action is available on the customer’s Payment methods tab.

Take card payment

Section titled “Take card payment”

Takes a card payment over the phone. See below.

One thing to know about the list: it only tests the payment methods your platform actually uses. With Direct Debit switched off, having no mandate is not counted as a gap.

Take Card Payment

Section titled “Take Card Payment”

You can key a customer’s card details while they are on the phone and take the payment there and then. The card number goes straight into Stripe from your browser and is never stored on the platform.

Where to find it: the customer’s Payments and Payment methods tabs, and each row of the No auto-collection worklist. In the billing backend it also appears on the customer, invoice and payment Action menus.

What you need:

  • The Payment Cards and Payments modules.
  • Telephone (MOTO) payments switched on for the customer’s dealer. This is off by default because it is rarely used, so it stays out of the menus until somebody asks for it.
  • Permission to edit the customer, and to add payments, card payments and cards.
  • Stripe configured for that dealer, with telephone payments enabled by Stripe on the account.

Taking a payment

Section titled “Taking a payment”

Step 1 - the details.

Required: the Amount. It is filled in for you - the account balance, the invoice balance, or the payment you are settling - and is read-only where the context fixes it.

Optional:

  • Reference for the payment record.
  • Keep card - store the card for future automatic collections. Tick this only where the customer has agreed to it.
  • Stripe receipt email - Stripe sends its own card receipt to this address. It is separate from anything the platform sends, and is not stored.
  • Notes for the activity log.

Step 2 - the card. Enter the name on the card and the card details.

Read the card details back to the customer before confirming.

What happens: the payment is taken and recorded exactly as an online card payment would be, allocated to a named invoice first where there is one.

Important:

  • A card you do not keep is stored as Single Use and is never collected from again.
  • The minimum is Stripe’s own minimum for the currency; the maximum is £999,999.99.
  • Where the amount is fixed by an existing payment, it is re-checked at the moment of charging. If somebody collected or reversed it while your page was open, nothing is charged and you are told.

Stripe Connect

Section titled “Stripe Connect”

Dealers can connect their own Stripe account from Integrations, Stripe, using in-platform authorisation. Charges are then taken directly on the dealer’s own account, and stored customer and payment method references keep working.

Where a dealer has both a connection and an API key, the connection is used. Revoking the connection in the Stripe dashboard clears it here too.

Section titled “Related pages”