Recurring donation via eCheck/ACH possible?

[[email protected]]

I've looked for Articles on the C&P knowledge page but don't seem to find a clear answer to this basic question: Can a donor actually make their recurring donation via their bank account (what you call "eCheck" option)?

We had one historic donor who set up a recurring donation via eCheck, but the payments never actually posted. We then removed the eCheck option from our Campaign Form. This is disappointing as it's been a best practice for several years now to migrate recurring donors from credit card payments (which are frequently interrupted by lost or expired cards) to direct ACH bank transfers. Please advise. Did we perhaps just have a strange glitch with our one (and only) eCheck recurring donor? Or is that simply not a viable option?

[CnP.Support]

[email protected]

Yes you definitely can. eCheck / ACH is a method used by a lot of our clients and their patrons are charged per the recurring schedule.

If you tell us what client had the issue or that never ran please let us know and we can review it. eCheck should work fine.

[[email protected]]

Okay, thank you. We deleted those bad payments, so they're no longer accessible in our Salesforce instance. I will search in our C&P Transactions to see if I can locate them. Glad to know we CAN indeed set up the recurring donation via eCheck/ACH after all.

However, I think two things are confusing about this: 1) It requires the donor to enter a Check Number in addition to Routing and Account numbers. Why is that? And must it be a check number that is actually in the account holder's checking account sequence? Do the subsequent recurring donations need (or get assigned?) a Check Number?

2) This warning text appears in red next to the eCheck/ACH payment option in C&P Connect: Payment scheduling is not available for ACH/eCheck. I realize there's a subtle but important difference between "Recurring" payments and scheduled Payments, but this seemed to reinforce the impression we had that the eCheck was not a recurring option. I was hoping to find an article explaining all of this in the Knowledge part of your site; I think it would help other users deploy this option.

[CnP.Support]

Ryan,

The check number is a required field by the gateway. We used to hide the field and put a 999 in the field but then we had clients complaint that their customer has received this email and charge showing a wrong check number., It is a no win situation.

The check number essentially indicates the start of the payment and the same number will be used for all the subsequent payments in the recurring. Again, as I said, this is a gateway requirement.

In reference to the support article, I have notified our training department to revisit the article and make it clear. Thank you for your suggestion.. I am sure they will attend to it quickly - they are now totally consumed by the training material for the next release of Salesforce Click & Pay platform.. This is a big year..

[[email protected]]

Thank you for the follow up explanation. Much appreciated!