There are features in a product that address small pain points for customers and then there are ones that make life a breeze. One such feature that falls under the latter category is Auto Charge.
The Auto Charge feature in Zoho Books automates the tedious process of charging your clients regularly. This feature lets you charge your customer’s credit card for recurring invoice payments on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. In case of failed payments, Zoho Books reattempts to process it after a few days (dunning).
With this feature on-board, we’ve eliminated all the major hassles that a business would typically face if they are invoicing on a recurring basis. Now, you don’t have to worry about:
Keeping track of multiple payments.
Manually invoicing customers every day/week/month.
Tracking overdue invoices
Extremely tedious follow ups and reminders.
Securely storing the customers’ card credentials.
So how does this feature help your business?
Charge Clients Automatically
Once the billing period has been set (days/weeks/months), Recurring invoices will be created and your customer’s card will be charged automatically. You can pause and resume the process whenever you want.
Get Alerts And Send Notifications
Be it invoicing, be it a payment failure, Zoho Books sends instant email notifications to you and your clients. Though the clients are auto charged by you regularly, the invoices for that are sent to the client for reference.
Manage Payment Failures and Retries
When a payment fails due to card expiry or incorrect card information, Zoho Books will reattempt processing the payment upto 3 times before the invoice is suspended, keeping you notified all the while.
Let Clients Update Critical Information
If your client’s credit card is nearing expiry or there is an incorrect card or address information, your clients can update all of that at their convenience from the client portal.
Huge sigh of relief, isn’t it? Zoho Books has currently enabled Auto Charge for Stripe. Enabling auto charge for other payment gateways is not far away. So, ideally if your business is all about invoicing customers on a regular basis, configure Auto Charge in Zoho Books, sit back and relax. Watch Zoho Books do its magic with Auto Charge!
Hi Harish, I have a related question/need: I own a rental business, and while I don't need to charge clients regularly in the subscription style (e.g. weekly, monthly, etc), I do sometimes need to charge a client after the fact, in the event of damage, a late return, or no return at all. Is there an easy way to do this with either the Stripe or Authorize.net integration with Zoho? Thanks, Edward
Hi Harish We need to charge the customers card in case he defaults on returning the goods he has taken. Will that be possible through Stripe?
Hi Dhawal, Yes, it is possible to charge them through Stripe for the above process that you've mentioned :) Regards, Harish
Could you give a detailed example of the accounting that goes on when using a auto-charge with Stripe (or Authorized). In Zoho Books Example: If the invoice is for 100 euros The fee for stripe is 2 % Will the customer still owe 2 euros? (100-2%) Will the AR account for the customer say fully paid? If so, how does the accounting go in detail when using auto.charge with Stripe/Authorized) Thank you,
How does ZB associate with a customer's stripe cc info? Do we need to have the name exactly the same in both systems, or the address, or a combination, etc?
Hi Kelly, Once you add and save a customer's card details in Zoho Books, a new customer will be created in your stripe account. All the details of that customer in Zoho Books will be automatically be copied to stripe. Regards, Harish
how to i set up auto charge on recurring invoices in Zoho Invoice?
Hi, You can set up auto charge in the 'Preferences' section from under the settings tab. We have a detailed help page on enabling it in Zoho Books. It works the same way in Zoho Invoice too. https://www.zoho.com/books/help/recurring-invoice/ri-createsend.html#toc_6Hope this helps! Regards, Harish