Collection Made Simple: Bank Payments
By LeagueApps
August 30, 2019
3 min
At LeagueApps, our team is dedicated to simplifying the collections process for sports organizers at every turn. In fact, many of our features and functionality are inspired directly from conversations with organizers. With that in mind, we’re officially introducing Bank Payments.
What You Need To Know
For starters, partners must use LeagueApps Gateway to accept Bank Payments. These payments are very similar to credit card payments (with a few minor differences, scroll below to see). Bank payments are the ideal payment method for coaches, parents, players without credit cards and are great for auto-billing. Unlike credit cards, they don’t have an expiration date. Bank Payments lead to more efficient collections, tracking and reporting when all payment activity is tracked inside of LeagueApps. We can work with organizations that have a high volume of check/offline payments to develop the right solution for their needs.
For a thorough explanation of how Bank Payments work and the functionality you and your organization can unlock, please click here.
FAQs
What Is ACH?
ACH stands for “Automated Clearing House” – which is just a fancy term for electronic payment with your bank account. Some people also call it an eCheck. We are calling the feature Bank Payments.
How does it work?
More traditional (old school) bank payments require users to enter their routing number and account number, then they must wait a few days to confirm micro-deposits. This would disrupt our registration flow and we wanted to provide a quicker, more convenient, and modern solution. We integrated with a company called Plaid to provide instant authorization of bank accounts. The user simply chooses their bank, logs in with their online bank credentials, and then select the bank account they wish to pay with. This process confirms ownership of the bank account, authorizes payments and replaces the lengthy micro-deposit process.
Is it secure?
This is the most secure method of taking ACH payments. LeagueApps never views or stores the users account details. Plaid is the industry leader in online bank connections. If you’ve connected your bank account to Venmo, then you have used Plaid.
Who can use Bank Payments?
Any partner that is on LeagueApps Gateway.
Can Bank Payment be accepted in the Management Console?
Yes, but only if the CPP has already linked their bank account. In those cases, an admin can pay an outstanding balance with the existing bank account. But an admin cannot link up a CPPs bank account.
What’s the difference between Credit Card and Bank Payments?
They are very similar. There are two main differences:
- Bank Payments do not have online refunds. We may be able to add this in the future if there is enough demand, but for the time being, partners can issue offline refunds like they would do for current cash or check payments or use our Credits feature.
- Bank Payments take 7 days to process. Unlike credit cards that are processed immediately, we will not know if the bank payment has succeeded or failed for that period of time. We assume that bank payment goes through and the registration will count towards any capacity limits.
A bank payment may fail if the account does not have enough money in it or is not set up to allow online payments. If it fails, an email is sent to the CPP, the Admin, and our CS team to notify them of a failed payment. The users invoice status gets changed to UNPAID but If the CPP will still remain as a registered participant. It is up to the admin to take any action if payment isn’t made. They may choose to remove the participant from the program or forgive/delay the required payment. An admin can use filtered transaction report to view a list of failed bank account payments to help manage failures.