2021

Ucollect :2021
CategoriesFeatures Release Notes
byuCollect

Improvements to Email Deliverability

As any Software As A Service provider will tell you, email deliverability is a huge problem.  Because we send the same email text to many people our messages frequently get classified as SPAM.  This usually gets better once the user has sent us an email as their email system recognizes that they are a trusted contact, but it’s still an annoying problem.  This is even worse when we send messages to your customers on your behalf for invitations or failure notifications.

We have been working on this for the last few months and in our latest update we have taken steps to improve our email deliverability.

Messages that we send to your customers (invitation and payment failure notices) can now be sent directly from your own email account (not via our server or account) through your Google or Outlook account, or by using your SMTP settings.  This means that the message comes direct from you, and all replies go to you, with none of the third-party sender flags that can cause SPAM scores to rise.  You can set this up in the Email Configuration section of the Edit, Organisation Settings page.  Simply choose the method you want, authorise Google or Outlook, or enter your SMTP Settings and you’re done!

CategoriesGateways News Release Notes
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Changes to the automatic retry of failed Credit Card payments

Visa recently announced additional fees for merchants if you process the same payment request more than 14 times in a month after the first one fails. This could result in large additional fees to our users as our system was designed to retry failed payments every day.

To address this we have changed the default behaviour when a payment fails. Now, we will try every day for 7 days, and then retry ever three days thereafter.

We do give you the option of retrying every other day and every day, but you may be subject to other charges (not by us mind you). You can change the default behaviour in your payment gateway settings page.

CategoriesGateways News
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Go Cardless Alternative (67% savings)

Xero has been pushing it’s integration with Go Cardless for a couple of years now. It does many of the things that uCollect does (although we’ve been doing it much longer). But at 1% of the transaction value (up to $4) it can be a very expensive option. It’s not bad if you only do one or two transactions a month, but it doesn’t take much to be very expensive.

uCollect has partners for Direct Debits in NZ, Australia, US, Canada and UK. We can offer affordable alternatives than Go Cardless in almost every scenario.

For example, a small accounting practice in Canada uses uCollect with our Pre-Authorized Debit partner, Forte Payments. Forte charges a $10/m statement fee plus around 30c per debit/credit. We ran the numbers with them. In April they processed $25K worth of invoices through Pre-Authorized Debits (65 invoices). Their total cost (including uCollect subscription) were $59. Had they processed the same transactions through Go Cardless it would have cost $183 – that over 67% less! Imagine the savings if you were processing more!

Plus, by using uCollect you get many extra features such as installment plans, automatic payments, manual control of invoices, etc. Contact us today if you want to explore what your costs might be by using uCollect.

CategoriesFeatures
byuCollect

Automatic Payments

Our Installments feature is a great tool to help you quickly and easily change the payment date or split the payment over multiple dates for a single invoice.  But when you need to do this across multiple invoices it can be a bit cumbersome.  Our Automatic Payment feature allows you to specify a set amount on a frequency, and uCollect will collect this amount and apply it to the oldest eligible invoice first.  Now you get to stay in complete control of the payment process, with much less effort.

Check out our Automatic Payments help article for the full details.