Stripe supports accepting ACH payments - direct from bank accounts - alongside credit cards. ACH is currently supported only for Stripe businesses based in the US. In order for your parents to pay you using ACH, they must first verify their banking account information. There are two options for verification.
1. Verification using Microdeposits
With microdeposits, your parents will enter their bank account information and then will receive two small deposits in that account. They will then need to return to your parent portal and enter those deposit amounts. If they enter the correct deposit amounts, the bank account is saved for them and they can choose to make online payments with it or enable that account for auto-pay (if you offer auto-pay). These deposits take 1-2 business days to appear on the customer’s online statement. The statement has a description that includes AMTS followed by the two microdeposit amounts.
2. Verification using Plaid
Plaid is a service that allows your parents to immediately verify their bank account information by securely providing their online banking credentials. This means that when they verify with Plaid, they can immediately make the payment to you using that bank account rather than waiting for deposits to arrive.
When you have both options set up, the parent is able to choose which one they would like to use.
If they choose to "Verify Now - Login" they are able to login to their online banking account and select the account they would like to use without exiting your parent portal.
If they choose to "Verify Later - Deposits" they are asked to enter their banking information manually.
After they click "Save," that account is now pending. It CANNOT be used for payment until it is verified by the parent entering the amounts of the deposits they received. When a parent has a pending ACH account they see this message when they log in.
They can then click that link to enter the deposit amounts and verify the bank account, or they can delete the pending bank account if they need to start over for any reason.
Because of these required verification steps, you ARE NOT able to enroll a parent into auto-pay using a bank account. The parent will have to log into their parent portal account and set that up. Once a parent has saved and verified a bank account however, you are able to process payments throughout the Studio Pro system by selecting that bank account from the saved payment methods dropdown when checking out.
Important: Even with the required verification steps, ACH payments can still fail for reasons like insufficient funds in the account entered. For this reason, we recommend that you enable ACH Failure notifications in your Studio Pro Stripe settings. You have the option to send those notifications to your main account email address and/or enter multiple other email addresses.
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