Most of my customers are 501.c3, EDU, etc… All of them prefer ACH, and I prefer ACH as well. There is not a clean way to do ACH without piping through Stripe (for a fee),which is a weird approach because the whole point is to avoid unnecessary fees (which stripe is). I would love to see a way to have a subscription or payment option at all for ACH that offers the Routing, Account, and initiate payment option. It could pass the customer name and invoice to the memo field, and when tied to the bank account can be marked as paid once it is settled into the balance. This would eliminate 50% of my monthly fees.
Hi,
Thanks for your feedback!
In theory that would be great, but I believe it would be challenging to implement.
I know that Wells Fargo, Chase, First National, and there are a couple of others that have APIs for ACH transactions, and Chase will allow the customer to initiate it and link their account. We had worked on this with ERP next, but frankly no one understood the frappe thing.
I could see a couple ways this could be present.
The customer selects ACH as a payment, and presents a template based form based on branch required values and whether they are the recipient or sender. Customers wanting to pay with ACH and set it up as a routine payment each month would see a pop-up with the bank name, routing, and account details, which they should see an option to click copy and have a collapsed section of text with instructions. They go to their bank, initiate the transaction, and use the Note line for the invoice number, and when they select Confirm Payment Initiation, that begins a cron. timer which does an API post a couple of times per day. until it gets marked as paid. once that pops, still goes to the general ledger but also saves everyone money and gives the clients what they want.
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Came here to ask for this as well. My clients often pay me via ACH but i have no way to know this is happening without searching my Wells Fargo account history. So, inevitably, I go after them for a collection, and then they point out that they already paid via ACH.
While an automated system would be nice, even just having a way for a client to indicate a payment had been made via ACH would be very useful, because then at least I would know to look for their payment and not bug them for it. You could add a way for clients to indicate a payment was coming via check, as well, while you were at it. And, include a note field in case they want to note the ACH number, check number, or write me a memo.
I’m not saying change the payment status to paid or anything - the status could be “Payment Processed, Per Client” or something. Then, I could manually verify the payment was received and do the usual “Enter Payment” process to update the status.