Overcome NetSuite Payment Link Web Pay Challenges

This article is relevant if you are seeking to use NetSuite’s Payment Link to allow customers to pay invoices on the web but you need more features and options.

Background

NetSuite 2021.2 released an option to allow invoices to be paid with credit cards and other payment instruments. Thus, any NetSuite account that is using SuitePayments certified payment processors should be able to activate the Payment Link option.

I speculated that NetSuite needed to compete with the web payment functionality that is available in Intuit Quickbooks. Indeed, it appears they have a near on-par capacity for customers paying invoices over the web. This is great news for the NetSuite community!

Yet, for many NetSuite customers, the NetSuite Payment Link offering is not going to be flexible enough for more demanding organizations.

Reference to Prolecto Web Pay Technologies

Since 2016, my firm has provided its clients a free-of-license-charge mechanism to allow NetSuite-driven organizations to produce web-based payments. Over the years, the capacities have been enhanced as we have taken care of more and more client situations. All of this is afforded by the extensibility power offered by the NetSuite platform.  A demonstration of some of the features is here.

Thus, this article is helpful to organizations that wish to understand the setup requirements and some of the obstacles that will be faced using NetSuite’s new native Payment Link. The good news is that these obstacles can be overcome with a technology library that can be enhanced to fit specific requirements.

Activating NetSuite Payment Link Considerations

For NetSuite customers that have been on the platform for some time (legacy), to enable Payment Link requires the activation of NetSuite Payment Instruments technologies. New NetSuite accounts have this feature activated by default.

The activation of this Payment Instrument feature on existing accounts may disrupt NetSuite usage and possible existing technology integrations. The standard “Charge Card” and “CC Approved” checkboxes disappear from the user interface (they are still there for scripting for backward compatibility) and thus may confuse users in day-to-day operations. Thus, it is a good idea to activate this feature in the sandbox or release preview to study the impact on the specific configuration.

We have found that activating the Payment Link feature in some configurations has activated unexpected credit card authorizations in sales order operations.  Be sure to test various parts of NetSuite before going live.

Once you have activated NetSuite Payment Instrument features, you now can enable Payment Link. The instructions are provided in the NetSuite Help reference so I won’t repeat them here. One consideration for legacy accounts is that existing payment methods will need to be recreated for activation of Payment Link features.

Overcoming NetSuite Payment Link Challenges

We have assisted clients to activate Payment Link technologies. Thus, we have listened to various challenges they have faced. The good news is that we have overcome all of these.

1. Control over Presentation: the Payment Link page gives very little control over the presentation. The presentation is reasonably good especially as you contrast it to the Quickbooks option. Besides a logo, company name, and address information, no other elements can change. For example, if you want to hide specific line items on the NetSuite-provided web page, you are out of luck. You are not stuck though. If you want to gain control, see my 2016 article, Accept Credit Cards without a NetSuite Web Site, which gives you complete access to the presentation.
2. Only Payment of a Single Invoice: the Payment Link feature only allows payment on a single invoice. We have produced a mechanism to allow customers to pay on a Customer Statement. The customer statement is fully configurable for both data scope and presentation. See my 2018 article, Accept Credit Cards in NetSuite via a Customer Statement. This makes much sense for facilitating collections in customer late-pay concerns.
3. Customer Deposits: NetSuite Payment Link only works on payments on invoices. We have a license-free technology that allows the proper generation of invoices for the production of customer deposits. This will drive Payment Link to now present an invoice which will result in a customer deposit. However, we can simply just go direct: we can present an Opportunity, Estimate, Project, Sales Order (or any custom record) to produce a customer deposit record to be generated via Web Pay. Just get it done! See my 2018 article to watch a demonstration.
4. Authorize a Credit Card: NetSuite Payment Link is about invoices. But what if you want to simply authorize a credit card for a sale before delivery? There is no option. However, our technologies will allow you to take a sales order, present it to the customer, and produce an authorization.
5. Store Credit Card Options: Some situations, especially in recurring subscription-based businesses, require that you store a Payment Instrument backed tokenized credit card or ACH information. NetSuite Payment Link makes no offer. Our technologies allow for customer-driven options to securely store information in NetSuite’s Payment Instrument structures. You can capture payment information while collecting information in web pay situations and we have also crafted integrations with third-party customer portals for generating seamless non-web pay user experiences.
6. ACH and Coastal Financial Offerings: If the NetSuite configuration supports native ACH-based Payment Instruments, then an ACH-based invoice can be paid using Payment Link. However, for customers using the long-time used Coastal Financial driven ACH system and non SuitePayments certified flows, we have solved for those customer-web pay flows and other non-standard ACH/Wire situations. See my 2021 article, Accept ACH from Customers via NetSuite Hosted Website.
7. Additional Charges: in some situations, you may want to add an additional charge for web payments. While it is feasible to add more lines on an invoice for Payment Link to work, we have solved it by making that method dynamic only in the case the customer indeed pays via Web Pay.
8. Email Notification Control: NetSuite Payment Link leverages NetSuite-driven email templates for Accept or Rejected payment notifications. However, you can’t get control over the sender address as it uses the globally defined email in the company setup. In addition, data reach in native technologies is limited. We have a complete framework for generating high-quality content that can drive superior customer messaging.

NetSuite Platform Enables Possibilities

The good news is that an organization can use NetSuite’s new Payment Link feature and still overcome challenges in side-by-side configurations. Thus, if you need an additional feature, such as pay by customer statement, it can be utilized without losing your existing configuration.

The ways we have solved these challenges are all based on the built-in platform offerings. What is illustrated is that with ingenuity and know-how, and the power of the platform, you can indeed overcome your NetSuite challenge. We add value by offering all of our clients our already-built algorithms license-free. With our technical experts who hold high standards for care, we are repeatedly told that we produce elegant solutions.

If you found this article relevant, feel free to sign up for notifications to new articles as I post them. If you have a NetSuite payment challenge to overcome, 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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