This article is relevant if you are seeking to have your customers use NetSuite to pay their obligations with electronic payments, such as ACH and credit cards.
Background
In 2016, I wrote an article, Accept Credit Cards without a NetSuite Web Site to help all NetSuite customers that use a NetSuite SuitePayments certified payment gateways, such as Solupay, CyberSource, or Merchant eSolutions, learn how they can bolt on a mechanism to have their customers provide a credit card, in a secure manner, to pay an invoice/bill. I subsequently wrote articles in 2018, NetSuite Video Demonstration: Accept Credit Cards, and How to Drive NetSuite Credit Card Acceptance against a Sales Order further demonstrating what is possible on this theme.
Enthusiastically, many NetSuite customers need to produce customer statements. Last week, I wrote an article, Extend NetSuite Customer Statements, to demonstrate the power of taking control over the customer statement generation process. Importantly, why not have a customer statement be the basis for accepting credit cards? Indeed, we extended the technology we give to our clients, license-free, to Accept Credit Cards in NetSuite via a Customer Statement.
Yet, credit cards impose their own fee structure and alternatives are available. Notwithstanding that I have spoken and produced Bitcoin integration with NetSuite since 2012 which can bypass traditional banking platforms, the conventional wisdom is to consider bank payments such as Automated Clearing House or more commonly known as ACH.
Click images to get a feel for the application.
NetSuite Payment Instruments with Customer Payment
NetSuite extended the platform in 2021.1 to include the new “Payment Instruments” record. The new mechanism abstracts away the complexities that must be managed between credit card tokens and other forms of payment. Think of this as a ‘payment method’ but it instead importantly has information that drives processing logic. For example, if you use NetSuite Electronic Bank Payments bundle to produce integration between NetSuite and your bank, the new Payment Instruments feature provides the bridge to hold bank account information which then is supplied to the bank to collect (or pay) funds. For many United States-based customers that used NetSuite’s long-term partner, Coastal Software & Consulting, to drive ACH payments, the Payment Instruments opens a world of processing options. In the past, the Coastal payment record was not scriptable to the platform and thus was effectively “closed” architecture. This is no longer true.
Naturally, because our firm is a NetSuite Systems Integrator, we extend NetSuite to take advantage of the power of the Platform via scripting and other custom capacities. Within the last 12 months, a number of our customers asked us to include the ACH payment option in the branded customer-facing website used to collect credit cards.
Click images to see more detail.
Manage Customer Facing NetSuite Based Payment Flows
Since we developed the software in 2016, we continue to enhance it when our customers need new capacities. While it is possible to use this software as a template to other non-SuitePayments Certified providers, when going with the traditional NetSuite integrated payment gateways, we can quickly get a NetSuite customer live. We developed the software so we can configure switches to get the setup the way our clients want. For example, in our article, NetSuite Credit Card Payments with Additional Charges, we illustrate how companies can elect to activate payment convenience charges (note, these practices may have implications between the terms provided by the customer’s payment gateway company and should be judiciously contemplated before activation). Further, consider that an accounts receivable manager may want to send late invoice reminders to their customers and then provide them with web links to pay electronically. Our license-free content generation tools have made it easy, since 2015, to craft powerful customer-facing messages that can be generated and distributed by coupling them to criteria driven logic inside NetSuite.
Our business model is to add value by being in a service relationship — thus we give our customers our algorithms without license charge. We assess that it is more important to listen to our clients‘ specific concerns and bring forth the best thinking, tools, and practices to improve the situation than it is to peddle software. We speculate that when you work with us, you will realize that our ethically driven team is highly talented and thus can bring superior intellectual capabilities to your NetSuite challenge. Our hope is that you ask us to solve other, more complex, challenges — because as we serve our clients, our team gets better. This is why I call our firm an “Implementation and Innovation Practice”.
If you found this article relevant, feel free to sign up for notifications to new articles as I post them. If you are ready to have your customers use ACH or Credit Cards to pay their invoices, let’s have a conversation.
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Marty Zigman
Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.
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