Taking a deposit

Afternoon,

I have signed up to Stripe to take payments. But before we do a job the customer must pay a 50% deposit.

If I use paypal or stripe to take a payment directly from the invoice link then it always wants to take the full invoice amount. Is there away of getting around this?

Cheers

Mark

Hi Mark,

It’s not possible at this time for a client to make a partial payment against an invoice. However, this is possible with GoCardless if that’s of any interest?

You may also wish to add your vote to this thread:

I vote for a ‘part payments on Stripe’ facility. I signed up to Stripe last night only to find that none of my customers can use it to put down a deposit, so Stripe is not much use to me.

Can you confirm that GoCardless does allow for part payment of single invoices before I go ahead and set that up too? Now that I can’t legally apply a card handling fee, it’s cheaper to me if clients pay by Faster Payments (which is how I’m taking part payments and balances at the moment). Any discussions here on best practice?

BTW, why is ‘Apply a card handling fee’ still available on Manage Payment Options/Stripe - that’s very unhelpful and nearly made me do an illegal act!

Hi @Dan

Part payments can be made by clients providing the options have been enabled. This can be done on any payment provider. The difference with GoCardless however, is because of the nature of the direct debit system, you can request the funds from within QuickFile (either in whole, or in part), rather than waiting for a client to login and do it.

You can find more about partial payments here:
Allowing clients to make partial payments on invoices

I referenced a link above for the feature request thread for partial payments, which has since been moved to the “Implemented” category (November 2017).

Regarding the card fees, while these aren’t permitted in law for B2C transactions, they are still permitted on B2B transactions.

Thanks yes, just discovered the button, fantastic! I think I was looking at an old post that didn’t have the answer!

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Is there a step-by-step on how to request only part of the payment for an invoice with GoCardless? If I try to collect it from the invoice, the popup only has the full amount set. I’ve set to allow partial payments in Advanced Features.

Hi @iainhallam

There isn’t a way of taking a partial payment by direct debit at the moment (although a client can do this from their control panel).

You can however request a variable payment from the client themselves, rather than against an invoice. This would just assign it to their account as a pre-payment, which can later be used to pay down the invoice.

I agree that this could be a useful feature; if you would like to start a thread for it in the #feature category, we can monitor the interest in this for potential future development.

Ah, yes, found it by clicking on the Direct Debit panel in the client main screen.

There’s already a similar request in the Feature section to allow recurring payments (How to create staged invoices from an estimate) but I can create a new request for manual partial payment by direct debit.

I posted Request partial payment by DD from an invoice for the feature request.