Keeping a card on file

Seasonal customers are the same customers every year. A card on file turns “finish the job, send the email, wait” into “finish the job, and it is paid” — for the ones who opt in.

How a card gets on file

The customer puts it there, from their own job page, in one of two ways:

• While paying. Above the pay button they can tick to save the card for future work. That payment is then card-only, and the card is saved once the payment goes through.
• With nothing to pay. On a job that is already paid, they can press Save a card and enter one without being charged.

You cannot add one on their behalf, and there is no screen where anybody types a card number — the customer enters it on Stripe’s page and LakeOps never sees it. A bank account cannot be kept on file; only a card.

What they are agreeing to

That your company may charge the card automatically for work completed at their property, for the amount on each completion notice; that they can remove the authorization at any time from the link in any completion email or receipt; and that they will be emailed a receipt for every charge.

What happens when the next job closes

The job prices itself as usual, and the card is charged for what the job owes. The customer gets the completion email showing what was done, marked as paid rather than asking for money, and a receipt for the charge. Nothing is charged before the work is finished.

• Only while you are taking payments. If LakeOps Payments is paused, or payments are on hold, nothing is charged and the customer gets the ordinary completion email with a pay link.
• A crew’s last tick waits a moment. When a job completes because a crew member marked its last item done, the charge waits briefly first, so a mistaken tick can be undone by reopening the job instead of by a refund. A job completed with the Complete button, which asks for confirmation, is charged straight away.
• A number that looks wrong is held for a person. If a timer on the job ran twelve hours or more, or the price is more than three times what you usually charge for that service (once there are at least five earlier jobs for it to compare with), the card is not charged. The customer gets the completion email with a pay link, and the job’s activity says why the charge was held.
• Each job is charged once at most. A completion that arrives twice from a crew’s phone does not charge twice.

While a charge is on its way, reminders skip that customer.

When a charge declines

A card that is expired, canceled or over its limit is a normal thing, not an incident. The charge fails and the job stays unpaid; the customer gets the completion email with the pay link, and a short note saying the card was declined. The office sees a failed payment on the job. It is then ordinary outstanding money and shows up on the balances report like anything else.

A decline does not take the card off file — the card failed today, the customer did not withdraw their agreement — but LakeOps does not retry that job’s charge by itself.

Taking it off

The customer can remove the card from their job page, which they reach from the link in any completion email or receipt. No account, no password, no phone call to your office. A card somebody cannot get rid of without asking permission is not a card they should have left with you.

Once it is gone it is gone: nothing further is charged, the card is removed from your Stripe account too, and the record that they had agreed stays, marked as withdrawn. They can save a new one the same way they saved the first.