Payments Supported by FreshBooks – Accepting Credit Cards from your Clients
All US and Canadian FreshBooks accounts automatically come with the ability to accept credit cards online, with no setup required to accept payments from a client.
To existing FreshBooks users as of Oct 1st, 2014, we will be enabling this across your accounts over the next month. You will receive an email when you are enabled.
How to use FreshBooks Payments:
- How to accept credit cards on an invoice
- How do I get my money? – Connecting your bank account to receive payments
Things you’ll want to know:
- Why should I accept credit cards online as payment for my invoices?
- What currencies can I get paid with?
- What cards can I accept?
- What is the cost?
Love the Details? Here’s everything else you’d ever want to know:
Accept Credit Cards on an invoice back to top
If you have a FreshBooks account, all you have to do is create an invoice, and you’ll see a checkbox called “Accept Credit Cards”.
Simply enable the checkbox, send your invoice via email, and your client can pay with all major credit cards! It’s that easy.
Accepting Credit Cards on an Invoice
Connecting your bank account to receive your payments back to top
At some point, you have to connect your bank account so we can send your payments to you.
Setup only takes a few minutes and you only need to do it once:
- You will automatically receive an email when you receive your first payment with steps to connect your bank account. If you wish, you can complete setup before your first payment by heading to Settings > Accept Credit Cards, and clicking “Connect your Bank Account” in the blue notification box.
- You’ll be asked to set up a secure payments password. This password, in addition to your email, will be used whenever you need to do things like change your bank account or issue a refund to a client.
- After setting your password, you’ll be sent back to FreshBooks where you’ll fill out some information about your business, and then connect the bank account where your payments will be automatically deposited in the future.
Connecting your Bank Account
Why should I accept credit cards online as payment for my invoices? back to top
Our research shows that business owners that accept credit cards online for their invoices get paid on average 11 days faster. That’s more cash in your bank and faster.
When you accept credit cards with FreshBooks, it gives you several benefits that help you save time.You can see a comprehensive breakdown of the features of payments supported by FreshBooks here.
- When your client pays, your invoice is automatically set to paid and a payment is logged
- Your clients get a brand new payment form that is consistent in design with FreshBooks and very simple to use
- Any transaction fees, refunds, or chargebacks get automatically logged as expenses
- Auto-bills, a way to save your clients credit card information and charge them automatically, are 100% free
- Full payments support from your friends at FreshBooks, so you always have someone who knows where your money is
- The homepage widget helps you know exactly where your money is at all times
The homepage widget helps you know exactly where your money is at all times
What currencies can I get paid with? back to top
Right now, accepting credit cards in either US and Canadian dollars are supported. To accept US funds, you must have a valid US Bank account and address. Same goes for Canada.
You can charge clients that live outside of the US/ Canada – but you will have to charge them in USD/ CAD. Your client can pay their invoice with their local credit card, but their bank might charge them a conversion fee (and/ or international payments fee).
We’ll be working to bring more currency options to you in the future.
What cards can I accept? back to top
US customers: VISA, MC, AMEX, Discover, Diners Club, and JCB
Canadian customers: Currently, you can only accept VISA and MC, we are working on adding AMEX in the near future.
What is the cost? back to top
Pricing is very simple – It’ 2.9% + $0.30 on all card transactions, with the exception of American Express, which is 3.5% + $0.30.
There are no monthly or setup fees, and you only get charged when you make sales.
Why is American Express more expensive?
We’re always working to bring our costs down, and pass the savings on to our customers. Unfortunately, processing American Express cards is simply more expensive, and because of that we need to charge slightly more for it.
To help business owners save on fees, you have the ability to turn acceptance of any specific card type (VISA/MC/AMEX) off, just head to Settings > Accept Credit Cards and you’ll see:
Clicking edit will allow you to adjust which cards you accept from your clients.
I do not have access to the email FreshBooks is using to accept credit cards from my clients!
In order to make accepting credit card payments lightning fast, FreshBooks uses the email you sign up with to create a payments account with our partner WePay. If you’ve made an error in typing your email initially, or were using a test email to try out the product, this means that your credit card payments account was setup under the erroneous email.
If neither you nor anyone in your company has access to the email, but would like to use the accept credit cards feature in FreshBooks, you have two options: 1) If your FreshBooks account is brand new (and you haven’t received any payments yet), we recommend that you create a new FreshBooks account with your preferred email, which will then automatically create an accept credit cards payments account with that email.
2) If you would like the keep the current FreshBooks account, contact us at support@freshbooks.com and our support team will help you out.
