Overview
Auto-payments is a service that can automatically take payments for outstanding invoices. It is designed to collect payment from members 24 hours after their invoices are generated on the 1st of each month. This gives you and your members a window of opportunity to review invoices before any money is taken.
Please note that the auto payments service only takes payment for members that (a) have active subscriptions and (b) have a card on file.
Getting Set Up
To get started you need to go to Settings > Billing and select 'Automatic Invoicing, Emails and Payment'.
After this, you need to ensure that Stripe or Adyen is connected. You'll see this immediately below the 'Payment Automation' setion. If your billing settings look like this you'll need to follow the instructions here (or just click the 'Connect with Stripe' link!) to get up and running:
Getting Paid
Stripe or Adyen need to capture your member's card details in order to facilitate monthly recurring payments. To do this, your member simply needs to have made a payment, whether that's through the User Area, a product or plan you integrated into your website or an invoice pay the first invoice that is sent to them. They do this by using the 'Pay Now' button on their invoice. The button only appears when you have connected Stripe.
This is an example invoice what your member will receive:
After they've paid their first invoice, they won't need to add their card details again. Payments will always be taken on the 2nd day of each month.
Habu automatically updates the payment status of an invoice. If you see a 'Declined' payment status carry on reading.
Problems with Payments
It's possible that at some point an auto payment will fail. This could be due to any number of reasons ranging from a card expiring through to lack of sufficient funds.
If an invoice is showing 'Declined' select the invoice number to get further details.
Once you're in the detailed invoice view, you'll have further info about why the payment failed and what you or you member needs to do to resolve the problem. This is the data that Habu receives from Stripe or Adyen:
If you'd like to find out more with card failures, we have a dedicated help doc here.