Hello All,
I have been tasked to set up monthly automatic credit card charges for subscribers. Since I'm a novice Tess user, what things do I need to think about, do, not do, etc?
Jennifer,
Definitely refer to the documentation to understand the basic elements of entering pledges and setting up a payment schedule:
The most important things to do when preparing to do monthly credit card billing is to ensure that the pledge is entered with the schedule of monthly payments as needed, and to make sure the billing type is set to a type which will be accessed by running the Pledge Billing utility.
You'll probably also want to run the utility in "review" mode a few times to make sure that the action taken is appropriate based on the pledge data entered into the database.
Even today, over two years into the job here, I still encourage our people to run the Pledge Billing utility manually instead of having it set to run automatically. We could turn it over to an automatic run, but I'm a little too wary of making a bad charge and inconveniencing a patron.
Thank you,
Brian
Our organization uses invoices to allow patrons to pay monthly on the their subscription renewals; I'm not involved in pledges or donations. First we set up the invoice on the patron's account then set up the payment schedule on that invoice.
Now I'm trying to set up the Invoice Billing Utility and am noticing that it's NOT charging credit cards. I was able to get the utility to run properly yesterday but today it's not. I'm testing things on a LIST before I start using it in real life. Is there a date out of place?
Can you help me understand what's happening and how to fix things?
It might be an issue with the start and end dates of the invoice; if the payment schedule is set up for monthly billing and, for example, you have 2/1/2017 to 3/1/2017 as the Invoice Start and End Dates, you'll charge the credit card once for the payment that is on the schedule between those dates. Running it with the same data on a different day will only search that same date range again, so it won't charge any cards (even if there are payment dates post-3/1/2017 on the schedule).
We usually do Pledge Billing on our end so I'm less familiar with Invoice Billing, but you might need to update the Current Billing Period Start and End Dates as well to capture the active payments to be billed.
You'll also want to make sure that the Billing Type in the payment schedules is something like "Credit Card Billing" so that it matches the value in the Billing Type field when you run the Invoice Billing utility.
Let me know if the suggestions here have been completely useless, but hopefully something here will suggest a fix.
Sorry. Still at a loss to get these to process. I've tried changing dates on invoice start date and current billing period column and cut off date but nothing. Everything worked great the first day and then nothing since.
Have you tried the Ticket Order Billing utility?
That's what we use for all of our sub payment plans.
I'd be happy to go over the details and parameters we use with you, feel free to contact me directly.