Online Payment Options in the Portal (allowing your customers to submit online payments)

The Portal is a great way for your customers to submit payments directly to you. This feature requires that you are set up for E-Commerce with an approved payment gateway. By enabling the "Fees & Payments" tab, and checking the "Make a Payment" box, you can allow your customers to proactively submit payments to your organization. The submitted payment goes through your payment gateway into your merchant account. Jackrabbit logs the payment into the customer's transaction history, and you can even receive email notification that a payment was made. No further action is required by your or your staff - you do not have to run e-payment or e-batch to initiate payment as they have already "sent" it to you. You can control what payment options are available in the Portal.

You can control:

• Prevent Problem Accounts - Checking this box will prevent customers that are flagged as a Problem Account from being able to access the Registration tab.
• Payment ability - If you do want your customers to be able to proactively send payments to you online, and you have E-commerce set up, then check this box. If you do not want your customers to be able to send payments through the Portal, uncheck the Make a Payment box.
• Payment Options - For outstanding balances you have four choices from the Payment Mode drop-down box. If you select one of the "Payment amount cannot be changed", then they can only submit a payment for the full outstanding amount due at that time. Selecting a "Payment amount can be changed" will allow them to send payments that are less than their current outstanding balance.
• Automatically Post Tuition Fees - If you check this box, then each time the customer registers for a class in the Portal, the class fee is automatically posted to the Family account. Discounts are not calculated at this time - the full class tuition is posted - discounts must be manually adjusted if you use this feature.
• Updating of Credit Card or Bank Account - You control which you will allow: Can Update, View Only, or Hidden. (E-Commerce is not required for these fields).
  
• Each time a customer initiates (submits) a credit card payment, they must enter the card's CVV code for security verification.

The best way to understand the payment flow is to do one as your customers would. Once you have your desired Settings above saved, (and you have E-Commerce set up and working), you can go through these steps:

1. Create your own family, or a test family, in Jackrabbit. Post a fee for $1.00 to this family.
2. Assign a Billing Contact with a valid email address that is your own. You can enter your credit card information or bank account information under the Billing tab, or, you can wait and enter it in the Portal.
3. Reset the Portal Password by using the reset password button on the billing contact page, or by selecting the "I don't know my password" on your customer portal login (remember - you can access your portal from within your database BEFORE it is placed on your website by going to TOOLS > CUSTOMER PORTAL, then clicking the "Go to Customer Portal Login Page" in upper left corner).
4. Login to your portal. If you did not add your credit card or bank account information inside Jackrabbit, then go to the "My Account" tab and enter it now.
5. Go to the "Fees & Payments" tab and you should see the outstanding fee of $1.00. Use the "Make a Payment" button to initiate payment of this. This will actually charge the credit card and send the payment through your gateway and into your merchant account.
6. After completion and logging out, now log back into your Jackrabbit database and look at the family Transaction tab and you can see the approved payment.

For a very quick overview, watch Sections 11 and 12 on the Customer Portal Video