We are please to announce Release 1.1 of uCollect. In this release we include a few minor bug fixes and tweaks. The major changes that we have included in this release are:
The problem for low-cost SaaS solutions like ours is that phone-in support is incredibly expensive to maintain. So we have decided that a Live Chat feature would be ideal. We have chose the Pure Chat tool for it’s flexibility, multi-agent option and price. Now you can reach a live agent from both the main website and from within the application itself.
Now, we’re not available 24×7, but we’ve kept the hours as wide as we can. Sometimes we are away from the desk and forget to make ourselves unavailable – so please forgive us if it says where there but we are not. But we’re looking forward to being able to interact with you more actively.
EziDebit is one of New Zealand and Australia’s leading third-party provider of Direct Debit and Credit Card processing. They were our first choice to provide a non-bank interface for automated collection of Direct Debit transactions. Many small businesses can’t get approved as Direct Debit initiators or on-line Credit Card merchants through the regular banks and EziDebit provides an affordable process that makes it easy to use Direct Debits in your business.
Because EziDebit have API access to their engine uCollect can send your transaction request direct to EziDebit securely over the internet, meaning you do not have to get involved. You simply set up the interface (you need to email EziDebit for an authenication key) and then tell uCollect the customer ID that EziDebit have assigned – and the rest is magic! uCollect checks your Xero ledger daily to see if there are any collections pending and sends them direct to EziDebit for processing. It marks the invoice paid anticipating the arrival of the funds in a few days time. It truly is effortless. Give uCollect a go with our low subscription price (as low as US$13/month) and 30 day free trial.
To have someone from EziDebit call you please simply click here.
Most banks in Australia allow approved customers to initiate Direct Debits using an industry-standard file format called the “Australian Banking Association” file format (or ABA file). This file is not a comma separated file (CSV) like NZ banks mostly use – it is a fixed length file format which takes a bit more effort to create than a CSV file.
uCollect can output Direct Debit collection requests in this file format for you – initiated by the due date of the invoice in Xero. All you have to do is to configure the Gateway in uCollect with your unique data, and then tell uCollect which contacts will be collected using this method. We retrieve the bank account details from Xero, so uCollect never stores any sensitive data in our database (and this way there is only one place for you to change it), and generate the file for you. We send you an email when there are collections due so that you know to come back to uCollect to download the ABA file (it contains other people’s bank account numbers, so we never send it by email). As soon as you download the file we mark the invoices as paid in Xero.
If you are using Direct Debits in Australia please use our 30 day free trial to give it a try.