Online payments with Stripe

Interdatum uses Stripe Connect so your clients can pay estimate deposits and invoices by card in your client portal. Payments go to your own Stripe account. Until Stripe is connected and able to accept charges, clients see your offline payment instructions instead.

How do I connect Stripe?

Go to Settings → Client Portal and find the Stripe Connect section. Only owners and admins can change payment settings.

• Create new Stripe account creates a new Stripe account for your business and opens Stripe's onboarding, where you enter your business and bank details directly with Stripe. When you finish, Stripe sends you back to your Interdatum settings.
• Link existing account connects a Stripe account you already have. You sign in to Stripe and approve the connection. The linking link expires after 10 minutes, so start again if it times out.

Click Refresh status to update the connection status after you finish in Stripe. Your Stripe account itself (business details, bank account, payouts) is managed in your Stripe dashboard, not in Interdatum.

Reset onboarding removes the connected Stripe account from Interdatum so you can start again. Resetting doesn't delete the account in Stripe.

What do the Stripe connection statuses mean?

The Connected payments badge shows your Stripe account status:

• not connected — no Stripe account is connected yet.
• onboarding required — Stripe still needs details from you. Finish Stripe's onboarding.
• pending — details are submitted, but Stripe hasn't enabled charges yet.
• charges enabled — you can accept card payments; payouts aren't enabled yet.
• active — card payments and payouts are both enabled.
• restricted — Stripe has restricted the account or has overdue requirements. Check your Stripe dashboard.

Clients can pay online only when the connected account can accept charges and isn't restricted. Until then, Interdatum shows a Customers can't pay online yet notice on your estimates, invoices and payment settings, with a link to Open payment settings.

What do clients see when they pay online?

When online payments are ready, the client portal shows payment buttons on the client's estimates and invoices:

• Deposits — on a sent estimate that requires a deposit, the client ticks I agree to the Terms & Conditions and then clicks Pay Deposit. The button stays disabled until the terms box is ticked.
• Invoices — on a sent or partly paid invoice, the client clicks Pay Invoice. The online payment is for the full balance owing.

Clicking a payment button opens Stripe's secure checkout page, where the client enters their card and billing address. After paying (or cancelling), the client returns to the job in your client portal.

Your terms are the text you enter in Terms and Conditions in Settings → Client Portal.

What happens after a client pays online?

When Stripe confirms a payment, Interdatum updates the job automatically:

• Deposit paid — the estimate is marked accepted, the deposit amount is saved on the job, and a job waiting on its deposit moves to "Ready for Work". The client's timeline shows "Deposit paid".
• Invoice paid — the invoice is marked paid, the balance becomes zero, and the invoice PDF is stamped "PAID". The job is closed if nothing else in the File is outstanding.

The client gets a Deposit Received or Invoice Paid email using your email templates. If the client didn't have a billing address on file, the billing address entered at Stripe checkout is saved to the client's record. Addresses your team entered are never overwritten.

If a client pays an estimate or invoice that was voided or replaced after they opened it, the payment is still recorded and flagged on the timeline for your staff to review.

Where do I see online payments, and can I refund them?

Online payments appear in the job's Payments panel (on the Invoices tab) or Deposit payments panel (on the Estimates tab) as "Card (online)", with the amount and date. Payments your team recorded manually appear in the same list with their method, such as Cash or e-Transfer.

Card payments made through Stripe can't be deleted in Interdatum. Only manually recorded payments have a delete icon. To refund a card payment, issue the refund in your Stripe dashboard.

If you void an invoice that was already paid, the invoice stays in the File history and its recorded payment history is kept.

What if I don't use Stripe?

You can still get paid without Stripe. In Settings → Client Portal, fill in Offline payment instructions, for example your e-Transfer email address. The instructions are shown in the client portal when online payment isn't available, on invoice PDFs and in invoice emails.

Without online payments, clients can still accept estimates in the portal. For an estimate that requires a deposit, the client approves it and agrees to pay the deposit directly to you. When the money arrives, record it as a manual payment on the estimate or invoice.