Pay Now

uCollect's Pay Now service is how you get your customers involved in managing their payments. Our Pay Now page (subject to the settings you choose) allows your users to make one-time payments and sign up for automatic collection. You can also send an invitation that requests your customers to sign up for automatic collection using the gateway option of your choice.

Not all gateways are Pay Now enabled. In particular, upload gateways are not available through Pay Now, so if you only have upload gateways then you will be unable to use the Pay Now services. You can search for available gateways here – if you check the “Pay Now” option only those gateways that support the PayNow feature will show up.

The PayNow service also allows you to integrate with your accounting system so that your customers can pay directly from their statement or invoice.

There are a few steps that you need to do to get the PayNow option working:

1. Set up your visual identity and communication settings

Add your logo and contact information to the “Organisation Proflile” section of the “Edit Organisation” screen. It is displayed on the Pay Now screen as well as in certain email messages.

Click Edit Organisation in the menu bar
In the Organisation Profile section click “Edit Organisation
In the last entry box click “Choose File” to upload your logo or simply enter a URL where it can be found (we recommend a PNG with transparent background no larger than 300x300 pixels.
Enter your contact details (this is a requirement for most Payment Gateways)
Click the green Submit button

You also need to setup your email settings. You should do this even if you do not plan to send Invitations.

Click Edit Organisation in the menu bar
In the Email Settings section click “Edit Email"
Enter the name and email address that will be displayed in any outbound email messages to your customers.
Edit the Invitation Email Text if you want to.
Click the green Submit button.

2. Set up Pay Now for the Gateway in uCollect

Pay Now is configured at the Payment Gateway level. Each gateway that you want to use in the Pay Now service must be activated and configured. By default Pay Now is switched off when you create your payment gateway.

From the Edit Organisation menu item, scroll down to the “Payment Gateway” section, and click on the green pencil icon to the right of the gateway.

(If this section is not displayed then your Gateway is not able to do Pay Now).
Activate the “Make Available as a Pay Now option” check box.
Enter a description for the pay now service – this is what will be displayed to the user if you have multiple options under the heading “pay using”. We suggest that you say “Credit Card” rather than “Stripe” (as your customer will be thinking “I want to pay with my Credit Card” not “Oh – I really want to use Stripe”).
You may want to set up the new “Calculate Commission/Fees on Settlement” feature while you are here (if your gateway has standard commission structures)
Choose one of the “Eligible for” options:
- One-off payments only – this option will only be available on the Pay Now screen when “One-off invoice(s)” is selected, and not for “All invoices on their due date…”. This will not be available for Invitations.
- Automatic payments only – this option will only be available on the Pay Now screen when “All invoices on their due date…” is selected, and not “One-off invoice(s)” and for sending as an Invitation.
- One-off and Automatic Payments (default) – available for all Pay Now options and Invites.
- Automatic Payments by Invitation only – this option will not be available for use in Pay Now, but will be eligible to use when sending an invitation.
Check in the box beside “Send Admin an email when a customer activates a recurring option” if you want to receive an email every time a customer selects the ongoing authority (so that you can send them flowers, or change their branding theme in Xero to notify them that their account will be charged automatically).
Click Update.

3. Configure your Accounting System

If you use Xero you can connect to Xero's Payment Services option to integrate uCollect into Xero's Pay Now screen. Click here for instructions.

4. Send Invitations

Now that Pay Now is setup you can send Invitations to your customers if you want to.

The Pay Now Screen

This is the screen that your customer will see when they click through (this has since been updated - stand by for updated screen shots)
The user has the following options (depending on how they access the page):

I want to pay:

All invoices on their due date automatically: uCollect will show the user the overdue invoices as these will be collected immediately. uCollect will complete the contact profile with the payment details so that future invoices will be automatically collected on the due date. If there is an existing profile in uCollect it will be replaced. If set in the Gateway settings, uCollect will email the Admin users every time a user executes this option. This is the default option. If the contact has invoices that are overdue the system will default to collecting these as well, but the user has the option of suspending this (and providing a comment as to why).
Just this invoice: the details of the invoice link they clicked through are displayed. They can choose to pay just this one.
More than one invoice: uCollect will list ALL invoices from your accounting system for this contact and they can select which ones to pay.
One-off invoice(s): uCollect will list ALL invoices from your accounting system for this contact and they can select which ones to pay.

Pay Using

uCollect will list all Pay Now enabled gateways eligible for the selected payment option using the description specified in the Payment Gateway profile. If this contact already has a profile in uCollect then they will have the option to select that or create a new payment option. If there is only one option then this will be defaulted.