Customer Portal Auto Pay Workaround

Create a payment term for auto pay.

Set the property payment term to auto pay

Create an invoicing asst list for only auto pay terms

Create and batch all invoices together without sending them to customers

Create auto pay list in invoices with balance greater than $0

Add ...Add Payment to the display in the list 

Go through each invoice and process payments via card on file. 

Make sure the billing contact is set to receive electronic receipts

We are running into the same issue.  It feels like we are the last bill our customers probably pay manually.  We’ve known Aspire stores the payment information and can process the payments. 

David- thanks for your insight on your process to adding the auto payments to invoices. 

All that is missing is capturing the customer authorization since the customer portal does not have an authorization checkbox.  We are currently working with Aspire Care to create a layout for a $0 opportunity template.  The template will serve as our autopay authorization with terms and conditions and the customer can sign electronically.  We still will not have the ability to capture or store payment information without potential PCI compliance issues within the template.  Our terms will state the customer is responsible for maintaining payment information on the customer portal or we have permission to call for payment information.

This is our best option we thought of outside of paying for another product like docusign for capturing the payment information and signature. 

You can also include authorization language in your contract terms and conditions.

​@KevinWiley I set our auto-payment system up similarly to what David described. It’s worked well for us so far! Just keep in mind it seems automatic to the customer, but it is not on the business end.

I found this video in the knowledge base helpful as an illustration of how it flows through Aspire:
https://care.youraspire.com/en/articles/5427391-how-to-process-electronic-payments

​@David_Spiritus How did you set up the language in your contracts? Did you just have it as an optional opt-in line/check box? 

When in contract terms it is written as the payment expectation is Auto Pay….If you offer it as optional I would use a separate Auto Pay authorization form……..

I was going to ask about concerns with responsibility for payment, because we really don’t want to be manually processing payments for the customers. We make one mistake there, and we could lose a customer. Lacking the auto-pay feature seems like a huge miss on Aspire’s part within the customer portal. 

I’m also concerned with using “auto-pay” as a payment term, in case a card on file is declined and the invoice should be showing in an AR bucket. I’m thinking about using an opportunity or property tag, or even the new property type field. But given that (again) Aspire is limited in that you can’t filter by Opp tag or Property type in the invoice assistant, I’m almost forced to use Property tag. Unfortunately we’re already using that to distinguish different invoice layouts for our pickier customers, and these could overlap with customers wanting to be on auto-pay. Any suggestions how else we might filter for auto-pay?

​@KevinWiley I totally understand your concerns. We have had similar frustrations. 

Not sure if it helps, but you are able to name the term whatever you would like and set the number of days like any other payment term. I use it similarly to how you are using tags to sort out which invoices need to be paid when.
If the card is declined, I believe it will still show up in the AR bucket, as the balance due would not be 0. When we have had cards get declined, we normally get an error in the payments tab, and the invoice retains its original balance and has an open balance in the receivables tab.

You could try using “Auto-pay” as the ‘Sales Rep’ or ‘Account Manager’ and filter by that if you aren’t already using that data for other things? You could also try the ‘Industry Name’ field in the property?

Any decline card or ach will remain as a balalnce due and display as AR….there is also an electronic payment report that should be reviewed regularly to catch declined payments…..The payment term is really the best field as it is the most concistently availalbe to filter by in Inv Asst and Invoices…...