See also:
What is Collect Now?
via saved Credit Cards or Bank Details
Collect Now allows you to collect payments from your customers proactively rather than being at the mercy of your customers to pay you. You simply select the due / overdue invoices, and with a click of a button, collect the amount owed by your customer. Your customer's saved credit card / bank account is automatically debited and once the funds are cleared, it is auto-allocated back to your Accounting Software resulting in an easy, timely and hassle free transaction.
How to enable Collect Now?
Pre-requisites: you must be using ezyCollect Payments or Payrix
First, you will need to acquire Direct Debit Authority from your existing customers. If you are based in AU/NZ, please use this guideline: How to acquire Direct Debit Authority If you are based in the US, please use this guideline: Automatic Payment Authorisation.
If you have an existing list of eDDAs acquired through Payrix or any other Merchant, please reach out to customersuccess@ezycollect.com.au and our team will assist you.
How to check if customers have DDA acquired or not acquired?
Login to your ezyCollect file.
Click the Customer Tab. The green $ icon indicates the DDA is acquired. The orange envelope icon indicates the DDA is not.
You can apply the filter by DDA (Acquired) to quickly identify those that you can collect payments using Collect Now.
Alternatively, you can click into the individual customer name. This action opens up their customer details page and just below the customer company name, you'll see the applicable DDA status / action.
How to use Collect Now?
Login to your ezyCollect file.
On the Customer Tab, select your customer by clicking into the customer name. This action opens up their customer details page.
Scroll down to the invoice list, select the open invoice/s, hover over Payment Actions and click Collect Now. The same can be done for Sales Orders if you're an MYOB Advanced, Exo or NetSuite user.
A confirmation screen shows next providing more details about the payment method:
Saved Payment Method - This is the stored card/account details as per the Direct Debit Authority.a) If the payment method is Credit Card, the confirmation screen displays the Name on the card, last 4 digits and expiry date.
b) If it's Bank Transfer, it will show the name of the account, redacted bank account no. and branch no.
One-time Payment - In some cases, your customers may opt to use a different card/bank account for an one-off payment or call you to make a partial payment. see Collect Now On-Demand
Once you have clicked Collect Now, a green “$“ icon is displayed against the invoice to indicate that a payment is in progress.
NOTE: Processing does not happen instantly, especially if the amount is being debited from your customer’s bank account. The selected invoices remain frozen (un-selectable and un-actionable) on the ezyCollect UI for 2 days. Within 2 days if the invoices are paid, they are dropped in ezyCollect (upon the next successful sync). If the invoices remain open after 2 days, then it is assumed that the payment was not successful, therefore the invoices are activated again and communication workflow resumes.
You can also schedule a payment for a future date. This means you no longer have to log in every time to click Collect Now. You can schedule your collections for all outstanding invoices in a single go and it'll all happen automatically on the scheduled date.
Select the invoice(s), hover over Payment Actions, Schedule Payment, enter the date you want and click Schedule Payment
Once scheduled, a little calendar icon will appear next to the invoice. Hover your mouse over it and it'll show the date this invoice is scheduled to be debited automatically. To cancel the scheduled payment, simply click Cancel Schedule.
Notification for successful and failed collections - If the payment fails for any reason, a notification is sent your customer alerting them about the failure so that they can initiate manual payment if need be. If successful, you customer will receive a remittance confirmation.
Side Note: If you have another payment Merchant Provider, please refer to: Collect Now On-Demand (without eDDA)
Collect Now in Bulk
When you have multiple invoices under a customer and across many customers, going into their individual customer details record one after the other, selecting individual invoices and hitting collect now can be very time consuming and inefficient.
To view all of your invoices (both due and overdue) across all of your customers in a single page view, go to the "Invoices Ready to Collect" tab on the left hand side of your ezyCollect. Here, you'll find a list of all invoices that've been generated against customers who have already provided their direct debit authority, and do not have any other current payments scheduled against them.
You can select as many invoices as you want and hit Collect Now to take payment.
At 9am everyday, you'll receive an email showing a list of Customers with their total number of due/overdue invoices and the total amount that can be collected with Collect Now. This email:
Filters out Customers who have Auto-Collect or invoices with payments already scheduled
Groups due/overdue invoices per Customer (including excluded Customers)
Clicking on the Collect Now button will take you to the "invoices ready to collect" page as shown above.
Note: You'll only receive this email if Direct Debit is enabled in your Payment Settings.
IMPORTANT:
When the invoice page has invoices raised against a mix of customers who have chosen Credit Card and Bank Transfer, and if you have different transaction limits for both payment methods, the lower of the both will be considered as the default transaction limit.
If you have selected invoices totalling beyond your set transaction limit, Collect Now can still be actioned (unlike at the Customer level where the Collect Now button is greyed out). For example, if your transaction limit is $20,000 and you've selected invoices totaling $50,000 (across multiple customers), you can still click Collect Now and it'll be processed in one go. On the backend, the system automatically breaks it down into 3 separate transactions.
At the individual Customer level, if the total amount of invoices selected exceeds $20,000, you won't be able click Collect Now. Instead, you'll have to manually select/separate the invoices (within $20,000) and process Collect Now multiple times.
Cancel DDA within ezyCollect
You can cancel the DDA of your customers on their request. Once cancelled, in order to activate the authority again, your customer has to submit a new Electronic Direct Debit Request (EDDR) form.
In the Customer's detailed record, next to Direct Debit Acquired click "cancel authority" and confirm.
Collect Now for Sales Orders
If you're using MYOB Advanced, MYOB Exo or NetSuite, ezyCollect can now bring in your Sales Order data from your ERP. The Invoices section on your Customers page will now be under the umbrella Documents, with 2 tabs within the section - one for invoices, and the other for sales orders.
Note: Unlike invoices, only the numerical value pertaining to the Sales Order in your ERP (not the actual Sales Order itself) will be brought into ezyCollect. i.e. You won't be able to attach Sales Orders or include them in the Communication Workflow.
In this version, only full payment against sales orders is supported, and not partial payments.
Once payment is cleared, the information is written back against the corresponding Sales Order in MYOB Advanced / Oracle Netsuite. Please note that payment writeback for Sales Orders are not available yet in MYOB Exo.
User Permissions
Payrix
While all users can view the DDA status of each customer within the account, Collect Now operation can be executed only by Manager users. This is done for security purposes. If you need your user access to be updated, please send an email to CS at customersuccess@ezycollect.com.au.
ezyCollect Payments
Manager users can access Collect Now, Schedule Payments, and Auto Collect by default.
Standard and Call Center user can access the Collect Now and Schedule Payments functionalities according to the user configuration:
If the “Collect Now permission” is Enabled
The User can:
Run Collect now on customer dashboard
Run Collect now One-off Payment on customer dashboard
Run Schedule Payments on customer dashboard
Run Collect now on Invoices Ready to Collect (Collect Now in Bulk)
Run Schedule Payments on Invoices Ready to Collect (Collect Now in Bulk)
The User can’t:
Change the Direct Debit Settings on the “Payment Settings” menu
Cancel the authority on the customer dashboard
Enable/Disable the Auto collect on the customer dashboard
Enable/ Disable the Credit Terms Extension on the customer dashboard
Note: By default, the “Collect Now permission” is Disabled meaning the standard/call centre user can not see the Collect Now and Schedule Payments button on the customer dashboard and on the “Invoices Ready to Collect” menu.