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Offer cash discounts

How to charge clients the processing fees if they pay by credit card (if permitted in your state)?

Brigitte Chouinard avatar
Written by Brigitte Chouinard
Updated over 3 months ago

Plannit's payment schedules give you the flexibility to offer an automated cash discount to those clients that choose a payment method outside of Plannit Pay and to charge a convenience fee to recoup the processing fees if they use Plannit Pay.

Note

This procedure ONLY applies if you use quotes on all your Jobs and if you use Plannit Pay for credit card processing.

Here are the steps:

STEP 1 : Update your Product and services price catalog

To automate the process, we recommend that you update your price catalog to reflect the price with a mark-up equivalent to the convenience fee. For instance, if the item is $100 and you have a convenience fee of 3%, the new price in the catalog should be $103.

STEP 2 : Prepare a quote with the following payment calendar

To automate the process, all you have to do is send quotes where your client will be asked to choose a lower amount if the client pays cash or a slightly higher amount if paid with a credit card.

Here is how a typical payment calendar would look like if you want to take advantage of the convenience fee option :

Create a first payment calendar with a cash discount as follows (the example illustrated below is for a 30% payment due upon approval and the balance at the end of the job, but it works for any type of calendar)

  1. Select the discount percentage and amount.

  2. Adjust the payment methods to those that you WILL NOT charge a convenience fee for.

  3. Add a 2nd payment schedule WITHOUT a discount (click on +Add Payment schedule to do so).

  4. Adjust the payment methods to reflect those you WILL charge a fee for.

STEP 3 : Send the quote to the client

The client will receive the quote through the portal as usual and will see the following as per the image below. If the client chooses the option with the discount, it will offer ONLY those payment methods you had selected in the calendar (see below) :

And when the client receives the invoice upon approval this will be the message because Plannit Pay will not be offered :

If the client selects the second payment calendar this will appear :

And the payment window will then be as follows since the payment calendar offer these options :

In Plannit, you'll always be able to see what payment calendar has been chosen by the client to properly answer their questions in the payment calendar section of the quote, as seen below :

Note

  • Make sure you check if convenience fees are allowed in your State before implementing.

  • It is a good practice to add a note on the quote to specify that online payment is offered with a convenience fee.

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