Introduction
In Operate, you can collect recurring payments from your clients, using the Operate Portal and a payment gateway of your choice (from the list of supported processors).
How it Works
Recurring collection works in the following order:
You integrate one of the supported payment processors into your Operate Portal. Find out more in the Portal Payments Section of the Knowledge Base.
Your clients add their own payment methods and enable Autopay for recurring payments.
Once your clients make a first payment, you will be able to use the Operate system to automatically collect the payments without your customer needing to submit a payment themselves.
If PlacePay AutoPay is set by a Contact that is subsequently deleted or moved to different Account, the auto-collection will still work on the original Account.
Collecting Recurring Payments
We will focus on the third point in the process above, which involves you going through a few steps that allow you to automatically collect recurring payments. Here is how to proceed:
Go to Settings > General > Payment Processors and select the one that you have integrated with your Portal. In this guide, we will work with Stripe; however, the process is generally applicable.
Start the collection
On the next screen, click Start Collection.
As needed, select the Organization and/or Location for which you want to collect payments. Check the balance and if it looks good, then check the Agreed checkbox. Click Collect Now when you are ready.
Operate will ask you to confirm if you want to start collecting. Click Yes.
Your collection will now be completed and you will be prompted to download a collection log (it will also be sent to you via email). The log needs to be reviewed to see if there are any payments that failed - if there are, you would need to reach out to your clients and clarify. (this is often due to credit cards on file being past their expiration dates).
Autopay & Accounts Receivable
One of the key benefits of using autopay is that the payment will also be added to the accounts receivable module and will be reconciled against the outstanding invoices.
However, Operate will not reconcile the payment if an account has an outstanding credit or journal that has not yet been allocated, in this instance a payment will be added and the balance will be updated only. Should this occur, there will be a note against this payment in the log and you will need to edit and reconcile the payment manually.
Configuring Collections view
In Operate, you can configure the Collections page for the Payment Processors (BACS, Stripe, PlacePay, Opayo, GoCardless and Checkout), to include the invoices related data with due date filter and proceed with Collections per Invoice. By default, the Collections page just displays the outstanding amount to be collected per account.
Go to Settings > General > System and select the Operate Settings
Select the Billing Settings in the Operate settings
Scroll down to the Collections section, if you want the see an enhanced Collections view with invoice related details with Due Date, select Enable Collections with Invoice Due Date (unchecked by default).
When the field Enable Collections with Invoice Due Date is not checked, the Collections page for the payment processors display the outstanding amount per account.
When the field Enable Collections with Invoice Due Date is checked, the Collections page for the payment processors display invoice related details with Invoice due date filter.
The Invoices can be filtered with Due Date From and/or Due Date. Invoices are listed per account; the Outstanding Amount is displayed per account which is the sum of all invoices for the filtered view and Actual Account Balance is the total balance from the Accounts Receivables.
In a rare event of the user in the Collections screen has selected the Invoices to be collected for an Account and any of those invoices selected got paid before s/he clicks 'Collect Now' button, then only the invoices that are not paid will be collected.