Ucollect :Articles by: uCollect
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Installment Plans

There are times when you just need one invoice but need to collect that invoice over several installments.  So we’ve made it easy to be able to break down an invoice into smaller collections.  From the Invoice list you can easily add a payment plan.  This must total to the outstanding invoice amount before you can submit it.  From now on uCollect will ignore the invoice due date and will collect the installment amounts on the specified dates.   Each time we process the installment we double-check to make sure that the invoice is still unpaid (just in case you have processed a credit note or manual payment) and will collect the lower of the invoice amount outstanding or the installment amount.

Please note that installments override suspensions, so if you are suspending a contact with installments you will need to remove the installment plan.

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Suspend Contact

Even your best clients can hit a cash flow crunch.  Every now and then you need to suspend collections for a particular client at their request.  Now in uCollect you can easily and quickly mark a contact as suspended without having to delete any of the gateway data you are storing for them.  Then, when they are ready to resume automated collection you simply un-suspend them and uCollect will resume collections.  It’s all available from the Edit Contact screen.

CategoriesGateways
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SEPA Direct Debits are live

SEPA Xero Direct DebitEurope have been big on account-to-account payments for many years.  With the introduction of the Euro currency and the “Eurozone” banking integration, it is now possible to use Direct Debits to collect funds from a customer’s bank account from almost anywhere in Europe.  The “Single Euro Payments Area” (or SEPA) system uses a common XML file format (we just love standardisation!) that most banks in the Eurozone will accept.

Unfortunately it is an Upload type that you have to manually upload to your bank’s online banking system (we would prefer a direct API approach) – but beggars can’t be choosers here!  uCollect will email you when you have collections to initiate, and once you have downloaded the XML file for your bank uCollect will mark your invoice as paid in Xero.

CategoriesGateways
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Stripe Integration – automatically collect your Xero invoices using Stripe

stripe Xero automatic chargeXero has had a Payment Gateway for Stripe available for a while now – and it works nicely.  Stripe is a great tool for small businesses wanting to collect credit card payments.  Their fixed fees and no monthly charges can actually make it cheaper than using traditional gateways or Paypal – not to mention significantly easier!!

So we knew that getting Stripe working with uCollect was a high priority – in fact, we expedited this over several other features and gateways as we knew it would be great for many businesses all over the world!

Now you can use Stripe to automatically collect your Xero invoice payments on the due date.  To do this we need to know your Stripe Live Secret Key (from your Stripe Dashboard) – enter this into the Payment Gateway definition screen under Edit Organisation.  Once you have setup the gateway then you can assign Stripe as the collection method for any contact.  When assigning them you can either select an existing Customer from the Stripe database, or create one on the fly (and enter their Credit Card details).  uCollect does not store the credit card detail in our system – we send it direct to Stripe who returns to us a customer token that we use to initiate collections from.  It’s completely secure.

Stripe is available in USA, Canada, Australia and most of Europe (sorry Kiwis – not in NZ yet).  If Stripe is not available in your country then please go to this page and ask them to get on it!!