EziDebit

EziDebit is a leader in providing third-party Direct Debit and Credit Card payment services in New Zealand and Australia.  EziDebit is our preferred Direct Debit provider for NZ.

EziDebit fees for uCollect users are:

• No account setup fee
• No customer setup fee
• Direct Debits: $1.10 AU/$0.90 NZ (incl GST)
• Visa/Mastercard: 2.20% (min $1.10)
• AMEX/Diners: 4.40% (min $1.10)
• Authorisation fee (only for Pay Now transactions): $0.25
• Monthly Minimum fee $19.80

Advantages of using uCollect with EziDebit vs. EziDebit alone:

• uCollect makes reconciling easy as we record the payments and tag them for easy search in find & match.  EziDebit doesn’t mark anything as paid in your accounting system, so reconciling the deposit when you have had lots of transactions is much harder, especially if there are lots for the same amount.
• If a recurring amount changes you do not need to notify EziDebit of the change.  uCollect automatically collects based on the invoice outstanding amount.
• uCollect can calculate the expected commission amount from EziDebit and record this as a Spend Money transaction.
• Your customers can sign up for auto-collect by invitation or from an invoice Pay-Now button.

Creating your EziDebit Account

If you do not yet have an EziDebit account please click here to have the EziDebit team make contact with you.  If you already have an EziDebit account you can continue to use the same account.  To enable your account to work with uCollect you need to send the following message to support@ezidebit.com.au:

Please issue a digital key (v3.3 and v3.5 accounts) and public key (v3.5 accounts only) for client ID #####. Please leave all permissions as they are (i.e., do not make the account read-only) and change default Dishonour Action to ‘Dishonour with no action’. Please also activate the Real Time credit card payment option and supply us the Webpay Link.  We are integrating with uCollect who will initiate payments on our behalf. Also, please delete all scheduled payments as uCollect will reschedule them for us based on our invoice due dates.

If you have some customers on EziDebit that are not in your accounting system you should remove the last sentence, and contact EziDebit support to ensure that you get the correct entries removed.

In EziDebit you have the option of allowing EziDebit to automatically re-debit the customer account in the event of a failure.  This will clash with our payment failure process, so we recommend that you do NOT allow EziDebit to re-reprocess failed debits.  If you do allow them to, please set the “On notification of a failed payment what should we do?” gateway setting to “Do Nothing” to avoid the conflict.

If you would like to invitations or the pay now page we will also need your WebPay URL. Once your EziDebit account has been created you can generate this yourself from inside the EziDebit dashboard (Admin, Web Page Configuration) once you have made the page live. See detailed instructions from EziDebit here.

Setting up in uCollect

Please note that the following instructions and comments apply to the new EziDebit interface.  If you are using the old 3-3 interface please contact us before attempting to set up your uCollect account.

In uCollect we have split EziDebit into two gateways – one for Direct Debits and one for Credit Cards.  The same EziDebit account and Public/Digital Key is used to setup both options.  You do not need to set up one of the gateways in uCollect unless you intend to offer that payment method.  You can always add the other gateway later if you want to.

To set up your gateway in uCollect Add a new Gateway (Edit Organisation, or from the setup wizard) with the following details:

• Gateway: choose the Direct Debit or Credit Card gateway.  If you want both set one up first, then add the other through the Edit Organisation menu.
• Enter your Public Key and Digital Key received from EziDebit (NZ users will only have a Digital Key)
• Calculate Commission/Fees on Settlement: Because EziDebit settles net of fees then this is a good option for you to choose.  Enter the dollars per transaction and/or the percentage per transaction here.  Check with your EziDebit representative  to find out what your rates are if your account was not setup using the uCollect application.  We can not differentiate between PayNow charges (which attract an authorisation fee) and standard debit transactions – so if you are using a lot of pay now transactions you will either have to adjust these fees manually or not use the Commission option here.  Please note that if your EziDebit account is set up to charge the fees directly to the customer then you should not use this option in uCollect.
• Pay Now: (AU only) Both the Direct Debit and Credit Card options are eligible for Pay Now (and your customers can sign up for automatic collection).  For Credit Card (Real Time) you will need to also include the Webpay Link obtained from your EziDebit admin console (as stated above - see instructions here. This is also needed if you plan to send invitations.

For help on using the Gateway setup screen please see the help page.

Managing your Customers

When setting up your contacts in uCollect you have a few options:

• Invite: You can sent an invitation to a contact to have them fill out an electronic DDR form.
• Create:  You can click the “Create” tab in the contact gateway dialog to add the details if they have not already been created in EziDebit.  You still need to ensure that you have the correct authorisation to set up the bank account or credit card in uCollect (you should always use the most up-to-date version of the DDR forms available from your EziOnline portal).  We submit this data to EziDebit which assigns a Customer ID.  We do not store the account details in uCollect – we only store the Customer ID from EziDebit. (Note that this step does not apply to Ezidebit’s older 3-3 interface)
• Select: The select tab in the contact gateway dialog will show you a list of all customers already available in the EziDebit system.  Please note that this could be using CC or DD.  Due to a limitation in the Ezidebit API we only display 50 entries at a time and they are not properly sorted from the EziDebit end.  You may need to view many pages to find your customer as EziDebit does not give us this list properly sorted).
• Enter ID.  If your customer has already been setup in EziDebit you do not need to re-create them.  Simply obtain the Customer ID number from the EziDebit portal or your “New Customers Report” and enter this into the Enter ID tab in the contact gateway dialog .When you enter the Customer ID we validate it with EziDebit to ensure that it exists.  Please note that EziDebit has two customer ID numbers.  One appears on the customer page (e.g., 100-123-456) – this is NOT the one that you need.  To find the real customer ID number please look in the URL of the customer profile page.  It is usually 8 or 9 characters long.  If you submit the wrong one you will get “Failed to retrieve/store payment token” error message.  If you can't find the one you need contact our support team and send a FULL PAGE screen shot so we can see the URL bar.

Please note that the payments may display on the customers Bank Statement as “EZIDEBIT”, and not your name.

We do NOT recommend the “Collect each amount separately” option as EziDebit will generate an error on the third and subsequent payments.

Managing your Collections

uCollect will automatically send collection requests to EziDebit.  No additional involvement from you is required.  When EziDebit accept the request we will mark the invoice as paid in your accounting system.  The acceptance we receive from EziDebit is not necessarily a real-time approval.  It is still possible that the collection could be rejected by the bank.  If this happens you will be notified directly by EziDebit.  If you are notified of a rejected collection you can delete the payment (‘remove & redo' in Xero) which will throw the invoice into overdue status and will be re-attempted in the next daily cycle.

Important note on currencies: All EziDebit gateways are single currency.  This currency is the base currency for your country (NZD for New Zealand and AUD for Australia).  Do not attempt to collect invoices in other currencies through the EziDebit gateways as they will be treated as base currency at 1:1.  No FX conversion will be performed.

Please note that if you are using the Credit Card gateway the merchant name of “EziDebit Australia” will appear on your customer’s credit card statement, not your own.  For Direct Debits your business name will appear.  This is controlled by EziDebit, not us.

If you receive an error message “Add payment denied – Only active customers can have payments added to their schedule.” when processing payments this suggests that the customer has been marked as suspended or inactive in the EziDebit portal.  Please login to the EziDebit portal to check the status of the customer.  Ensure that there is an active bank/credit card on file and that there are NO scheduled payments (you should delete these or uCollect could initiate them again).  Then you should change the status to Active.  If you are not sure why your contact is not active please contact EziDebit Support.

Charge backs

Unfortunately charge backs are more common with Ezidebit than some other providers because your business name doesn’t show on the customer’s credit card statement.  This leads to confusion by the customer (“who is this EziDebit and why are they taking my money”) and usually a chargeback. EziDebit pass this risk back to you by sending you an email stating “We have received the following request from the account holders bank to provide a copy of the signed direct debit authority including a detailed description of the goods/services supplied for the following transactions” within 48 hours (and of course everything is electronic so no such signed document is available).

Reconciling your Deposits

Ezidebit usually settles your funds net of fees. There are fees for processing the payments, fees for adding the customers, and chargeback/failure fees. Unfortunately we can't predict these accurately. Because of this the deposit from EziDebit will not appear to match anything in your accounting system. You can read more about Reconciling Payments in Xero, but here are the recommended steps:

1. Go to the EziDebit console to see what items and fees are included in a settlement deposit.
2. Go to uCollect Collection History page to see what batches are included - these should total the amount of the collections (before fees). Note down the batch number(s) here.
3. In Xero Bank Reconciliation tab for the deposit click "Find & Match". Enter the batch number in the search area and select all the payments for that batch. If there is more than one batch repeat this until you have all batches in this settlement.
4. Under Adjustments, Bank Fee, add a line for the EziDebit Fees.
5. This should now agree to the total deposit and the reconcile button should be green. If it is not you need to go through the EziDebit console report for this deposit and check the items against the payments in the uCollect batches. In rare cases there may be an item that we think was paid, but was actually declined by EziDebit. Uncheck this from your Find & Match screen.

Known Issues

The following are known issues with the EziDebit interface:

• When choosing a customer from the EziDebit list (or manually entering an EziDebit ID) the system says “Please enter valid Payment Gateway ID/Token”.

  This can be caused by an internal EziDebit error when the address or cell phone digits are too long. Cell phone numbers have a 10 digit limit including country code (may effect some NZ numbers which have valid 11 digit phone numbers) – try deleting the cell phone number if yours is correct at 11 digits (EziDebit know of this problem but have no target date for fixing it). Address fields are limited to 30 characters – delete a few characters to stay within this limit.

• If you receive error “Failed to retrieve/store payment token” error message.” while entering an ID number you probably have the wrong ID.  EziDebit has two customer ID numbers.  One appears on the customer page – this is NOT the one that you need.  To find the real customer ID number please look in the URL of the customer profile page.  It is usually 8 or 9 characters long.
• All Ezidebit gateways are single currency. This currency is the base currency for your country. Do not attempt to collect invoices in other currencies through the EziDebit gateways as they will be treated as base currency amounts with no FX conversion.
• If you receive an error message “Add payment denied – Only active customers can have payments added to their schedule.” when processing payments this suggests that the customer has been marked as suspended or inactive in the EziDebit portal or their bank account has not been fully processed. Please login to the EziDebit portal to check the status of the customer. Ensure that there is an active bank/credit card on file and that the customer is active.  Please also check that the customer is set to the “On Demand” arrangement type, not “Scheduled.”
• Error message “Add payment denied – This customer already has 2 payments on this date” is due to a limitation in EziDebit that prevents a third payment being added for the same date.  This is usually caused when you have the “How should we handle multiple amounts to be collected from the same contact on the same day?” set to “Collect each amount separately” in the contact settings.  We recommend that you choose “Group them together and collect one amount” for EziDebit due to this limitation.  If you do want to keep the separate payment setting then uCollect will simply try the payment the next day automatically.