Wouldn’t it be great if something happened that improved your cashflow and reduced the amount of time you had to spend processing payments? You bet it would, which is why the release of Payment Services is such great news!
Once you’ve signed up with one of the supported payment services, your customers will be able to pay you immediately when they receive an online invoice – they simply click the Pay Now button, enter their credit card details and voila – you’re paid!
And it gets even better. Not only will the money be shooting its way into your bank account but we will automatically create the payment in Xero ready for you to reconcile as soon as the transaction appears in your bank feed. Magic.
Check out how it works in this short video.
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PayPal (Global)
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GoCardless (UK) – actually uses a direct debit process rather than credit card payments and you don’t even need a merchant account. Nice.
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Stripe (US)
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DPS Payment Express (AU, NZ, UK, US, SA and Asia)
When you sign up you nominate which bank account you would like payments to be deposited into and will be given the details you need to hook the payment service up to Xero.
If you don’t have a merchant account set up to use with any of these providers, but occasionally wish to receive credit card payments, you can use the existing integration with PayPal to accept these. This is handy, for example, if you have a holiday home that you hire out now and then and people wish to pay for this via credit card. You can read the details on setting up payment services on this page in our Help Center.
We’ve also added a couple of enhancements in response to feedback we had on invoice settings and bank reconciliation.
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New invoice settings to control how tax subtotals are grouped and what information is displayed on foreign exchange invoices
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If you’ve been missing the ability to undo a bulk Mark as Reconciled action, you’ll be glad to hear this is now back (and if you don’t know what I’m talking about – don’t worry, you probably don’t need it!)
We’re still working on a number of other cool features and enhancements, including:
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Email settings – a popular request on Community, you will be able to control how emails are sent from Xero. This work is all but ready and is scheduled to go out in about 3 week’s time.
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Taxable Payment Annual Report – this one’s for the Aussies and will allow those in the building industry to comply with the ATO’s new reporting standards – will be released before the end of June.
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Purchase orders – it’s taking a while but, as always, we think it’s worth doing properly. We’re going as fast as we can and will know more about when it’s likely to ship over the next few weeks.
Enjoy the new features and look forward to more rolling out over the coming months.
Please put in the ability to deal with UK CIS payments as I can then change all my construction clients over to Xero.
Excellent news. We will be setting ours up with the GoCardless nesxt week! Any advice on the way we should set it up would be greatly appreciated? We will just follow the process, it looks good with instant free setup though 🙂
Moneybookers/Skrill coming anytime soon??? Many of our EU clients and contractors use this one.
Looking forward to SwipeHQ integration :).
Will companies in South Africa also be able to use this feature?
Please, we want more option in Canada!!! Paypal fee are high…
Also, many of my customer have difficulty to pay with paypal when they don’t have a paypal account. They received an obscur message “The card you entered cannot be used for this payment. Please enter a different credit or debit card number.”
This is great news … however your API that returns invoice data really needs to include the public (non-login needed) url to the view invoice page. Our users should not have to login to both my app and yours to view an invoice and pay it. Please include this field in your API. It would make a HUGE difference for us.
For payments, that’s good news but we’ve invested in other solutions long ago because xero took so long, however, adding the bulk reconcile makes me happy – I can’t believe it was removed!
We currently use DPS to take automatic recurring subscription payments from customers. Therefore customers don’t manually pay via the invoice. However, at present we manually import the individual DPS transactions into Xero and reconcile them against the lump sum that comes into our bank account from DPS. Will this DPS integration lead to a direct feed of DPS transaction data into Xero? From my reading of the new help doc it seems that the reconciliation takes place per invoice when paid via the invoice.
Thank you for this. I can’t find documentation for the invoice formatting changes relating to tax subtotals. Are there examples on your help site? And can I show tax per line yet, without having to create a .docx invoice?
Are you considering the option of auto-reconciliation of these payments?
Fantastic step in the right direction and thanks to all who put a lot of work into this Payment Services launch.
It would be awesome if recurring payments could be created and applied against recurring invoices. I know a lot of customers who would willingly shut down accounts with other providers if this was an option (sometimes saving $30-$70/mth).
And thanks for adding Stripe for us Canucks.
Very straight forward to add. We started using Pay Pal for online credit card transactions a month or so ago, however, we had to send a payment request and some customers got confused thinking they needed a PayPal account.
This is perfect as it means we can get paid without the fuss. Our PayPal charges are not cheap, however, you can withdraw funds INSTANTLY!
Great to see the development continuing.
On the payment front is there any work going into BPay for my Australian clients. A common form of payment here but one not currently supported by xero.
Keep up the good work!
Alright, now I don’t have to explain to people that they don’t need a paypal account to pay online! Looks good!
Andrew, so glad to see Xero has integrated with Stripe! Thank you! Like other Saas companies, we set up reoccurring payments with customers, (rather than invoicing each month) and charge for overage through Stripe. Is it likely that this will also included as part of the integration at a later date?
@EssentialMarketer – if you have any issues setting up GoCardless (am sure it will be a breeze), then best to talk to them directly. Enjoy!
@Ross, @Will, @MarkBerghan – we will be deciding which new Payment Services to add moving forward by customer demand, so the best thing to do is to head on over to http://community.xero.com, set up a Feature Request, and gather some votes.
@Tiaan – DPS and PayPal are currently the only options for South Africa
@DavidCournoyer – hey, Stripe will work in Canada too.
@Aron – good idea, I’ll let the API guys know.
@Grant – no afraid not, feeds are still from the bank rather than from DPS.
@Nigel – well spotted, Help was updated with this information today – check out, http://help.xero.com/#Q_InvoiceSubtotal
@Doesjka – no, we won’t be auto-reconciling the payments. Mainly because of the challenges in getting it right 100% of the time and the pain of getting it wrong and not necessarily knowing about it until it’s too late.
The reconciliation process is made trickier because the different ways Payment Services apply their fees. Some will deduct the fee from each transaction, while others may aggregate the fees into a lump sum – this means that invoice payments in Xero may not add up exactly with the amount deposited into your account by the payment service.
Can we have the nice fresh invoice template demo’d in the video????
Please!
Would be great to see Dwolla integration as well! I know they don’t do credit cards, but they are quick and easy way to pay for clients. Can’t argue with a microscopic fee of only 25 cents per transaction (no percentages added!).
I need to be able to do subscription billing… recurring invoices that are auto-paid with stripe. When is that coming? I can do it today with freshbooks and integrate with xero but that seems silly, doesn’t it. 🙂
Hi guys. Any response to my request (and subsequently, Jason’s)? I think it is fair and would be a very welcomed addition that wouldn’t require much too much dev work.
@Jayden, @Jason – I made a general response above (didn’t call out your names, sorry) – suggested that you put weight behind the idea on community, https://community.xero.com/business/discussion/88861
eWAY is looking fwd in making it EASY for business to take payments via their invoices.
Please see http://www.eway.com.au/xero for some great news and offers for XERO customers. Cheers Matt Bullock CEO eWAY
So I’ve investigated with my Bank in NZ (ASB) and it looks like its quite a bit cheaper using PayPal – so I guess Ill just stick with the current method.
Would be brilliant to automatically add x% to a invoice when customer selects payment by Credit Card.
@Andrew – thanks for that. I missed your earlier response, sorry!
Ay response to my post about getting the invoice theme used in the demo video?
I’ve tried designing my own but they loose some of the nice touches of the standard theme…like discount advices, remittance advice cut-off icons etc.
@Peter – the only invoice we show in the video is an online invoice (http://help.xero.com/#OnlineInvoices) and was the result of a standard theme – you can send your customers an online invoice by selecting this option on the send dialog in Xero.
If you want more control over the PDF version of an invoice then create a new DOCX invoice theme, the default invoice template will be pretty close to the standard theme output and is a good place to start making incremental updates. You can also have a look at the demo version of Xero and see what customised templates they have there.
We’ve just set up DPS and it works well. It’s slightly different to the video above in that it takes our customer to the ugly DPS credit card details input screen. Is it possible to do this in Xero like the Video?
Hi, does this work for recurring billing? i.e. if a customer has a subscription and the customer enters their credit card details it will automatically bill the card monthLy?
Thanks in advance
@James – no, this is a restriction with the way we integrate with DPS. Each provider is different in this regard.
@Rob – no, not at this stage, I’m afraid. We agree this would be nice though.
Thanks Andrew,
Which payment providers appear to stay in the Xero website throughout the payment process like in the video?
At the moment we direct our customers to Xero online invoicing then they get sent to 3rd party to enter credit card details and I’m just worried about trust issues having to explain all the parties involved to our customers. (plus it’s an ugly screen)
The process in the video looks much better than our setup.
@James – currently the inline ones are Stripe and eWay.
Hi, Please default DPS gateway for repeating transactions to ‘yes’ (Currently set to ‘no’) in order to enable setting up monthly payments in the money user panel. No point having recurring invoices as a feature when you can’t set up recurring payments. Should literally be a 5 minute fix.
can someone help me set up the custom url with Elavon’s virtual merchant? My HTML code continues to not work.
Very good news, just having the ability to create an uncomplicated prompt to remain provided when reports will not be paid off time is much more beneficial
Guys,
Interested in your views…
How important is it for you and your customers to charge a credit card service fee ie 2% on top of the invoice amount when processing credit cards?
I hope Xero starts supporting BitPay or coinbase in the future. I’m tired of paying 3% for accepting credit card payments. Lets move to bitcoin to save 2% and get paid instantly. They pay via ACH the following day just like a credit card merchant service provider and its less expensive. The payments also come without a fear of chargeback of fraud. Not that my customers would be paying invoices with stolen credit cards, but you never know when their debit card might get bounced.
Thank you!
@Matt Bullock I can’t speak for my Aussie SBO counterparts, but for me, it is huge. We should not have to eat a 2.9% transaction fee impacting our cash flow just for the privilege of offering a faster payment alternative to our customers. If they want to take advantage of CC/DC payment options, they should have to carry, or at the very least, share the financial burden of doing so.
@Matt Sebastionelli and @Felipe in the absence of Xero supporting surcharges, eWAY have developed our own payment integration with them which does support setting surcharges on a per card type basis. Get in contact for more info.
I look forward to using new updated features of Payment Services especially the invoice settings.
Would be lovely to get Surcharges working on Xero when selecting payment.
Seems ridiculous that eWay has had to create a workaround… Any chance DPS might do the same until Xero works out how to get it sorted?
This sounds great, and definitely makes it so much convenient for all the users. Do you plan to increase the number of payment services you are working with? The reason I ask is that I’ve been using this service: https://worldcore.eu/ for a little less than a year and it’s been really convenient and fast to me, and I like their rates too. I understand you don’t do such things upon request, but is there a possibility you can include this service in your list? Thanks!