Types of Payment Gateways

Payment Gateways are the heart of uCollect. They are the methods that you use to collect money from your customers.  You can have more than one gateway, but each contact may only be assigned to a single gateway. If you have a contact where some invoices are collected by Credit Card and others by Direct Debit/eCheck then you will need to split them into two contacts in your accounting system or uCollect will attempt to collect from only one of these methods.

There are two types of gateways:

• Direct/API: Direct gateways are where we send the transaction direct to the gateway through the internet (using a secure transaction method known as an API). Once you have properly configured your gateway and contact we do not need to remind you or ask for any additional verification. We will simply initiate the collection for the due date as instructed. Once the gateway has confirmed that the request has been received we will record the payment in your accounting system in anticipation of the receipt of the funds.
• Upload: Upload gateways do not allow API transactions (so last century) so we need you to intervene in the process. We wish it wasn’t like this, but we have to work within the limitations of each gateway. Rather than sending the transaction direct to the gateway, we alert you when a transaction needs to be generated and then you have to upload the file to the gateway.  This is most common when working direct with a bank.

There are three steps to working with a payment gateway.

1. Setting up the Payment Gateway

Please see the Gateway Setup page.

2. Connecting the Contact to the Payment Gateway

Please see the Edit Contact page.  For most direct gateways you can send an email invitation or integrate with Xero's Pay Now page (Quickbooks users can use Pay Now URLs on their statements to direct customers to the uCollect Pay Now page).

3. Initiating the Collection Request

Collections are automatically initiated at your designated processing time each day (or on any hour when we haven't tested your organisation in at least 25 hours (to allow for API outages and server maintenance).  However, you can also manually initiate the payment batch at any time by using the ZZ Actions, Process Now menu option.

For upload gateways we can't automatically upload your batch to your bank.  So we send you an email to alert you to the fact that you need to log into uCollect and generate the batch to upload to your bank.  If you don't do this we will remind you every day (yes, we're a nag).