BACS payment option

#1

Hi James
I wrote to you in the past saying we use eitrher bank transfer or iZettle as payment options. It is becoming very tedious having to keep an eye on everyone’s balance. Some transfer money into our bank account for 2 classes, others just for 1, others for 10. Some requset a payment link and pay via iZettle.
It’s exhausting.
So I have decided to ditch iZettle in favour of Stripe, so I can integrate it with my Smoothbook bookings platform. Great so far!

Stripe do charge, so I would like to encourage people to still pay by BACS, whilst still obvisously offering the online paymeny option via Stripe. So I’ll have BACS and Stripe as the only payment options. The cost of the dance classes I run is £7.50/class, or £15 if one books onto the couples class (paying for 2). I need to understand the process of setting this up correctly.
Let’s assume someone transfers £22.50 into my bank account, that’s the equivalent of 3 single classes in advance. Once they have transfered their money, is it down to me to create a package on the system and call it “Solo classes”, link it to the customer and how do I show it’s for 3 classes?
Sorry if this sounds dumb, but I’m really unclear. I would love the system to keep an eye on the balance for each customer!

Help please!!!

#2

Hi @Tim_W,

I do understand where you’re coming from! It is definitely part of the plan to offer greater payment options, point of sale, etc. the difficulty being that payments are now technically complex - especially with the new requirements for Secure Customer Authentication which soon become law.

Having said that, it should be fairly easy to do what you need. The easiest is, as you say, to create a package that you can use to grant people access to a given number of classes. Then you can award them the package when you receive payment via BACS and you can adjust their credits depending on how much they paid. You can do that easily by selecting ‘customers’ from the main menu and searching for the customer to bring up their page. Scroll down to the ‘packages’ section and there you can easily award them a package and / or adjust their credits using the arrow keys.

Just one caution: when you create the package you should create a coupon code that is required before people can purchase it. Don’t give this code to anyone! The purpose is that the package will be offered as a payment option when people book so you want to prevent them from buying it themselves.

Hope that helps!