I am happy with the clean interface of the Client Portal. However,
I am running into a challenge: my customers would like to be
able to add tips/gratuities when making payments. Currently, this is
very clunky because they have to 1) manually over-pay, 2) let me know
that the excess payment was a tip and not a pre-payment for the next
service, and then 3) I have to go in and adjust the Invoice after the
fact. These steps are awkward and messy and time-consuming!
My request/idea/resolution:
I would love to see an option for me (business) to be able to let clients click to add a "gratuity"
line-item to an invoice so they can designate that an excess payment is intended as a tip, not a pre-payment or accidental overpayment.
This can be achieved by using the Zoho Checkouts application.
You have several options to achieve this. The first step is to create a Zoho Checkouts Payment Service and design it appropriately for tips. You would then embed this on your website on a static page, or you could provide a link in the invoice your customer receives or even within the email notifier from Zoho Books.
You can embed via an inframe or script so you would put together a page specifically for tips with a nice gesture and thank you note... you can also do the same within Zoho Checkout interface with its fully customisable interface and then provide a link to this as mentioned above. So you can fully customise and tailor the user experience before a tip is placed so they are appropriately thanked for their lovely gesture.
This would also help with setting rules / automatically identifying transactions in the banking area of Zoho Books, because the payments through Zoho Checkout can be marked separately. You could set a separate account in Zoho Books for tips... and create a rule to auto-categorise these transactions as they come in,
This would provide the solution you require and would be fully automated requiring no input on your part. The only drawback currently is the customer would need to make two payments - but one might argue that they may not be in the position to pay a tip at the time of invoice settlement so with this option they can come back and make a tip payment at any time.
If you require any support setting this up, you can contact me at james[at]digital-scientists.co.uk or use the link below
Zoho Checkouts is not an option for us, it's clunky. Customers need to be able to add a tip when they view their invoice, just like Paypal does. In fact, that's how we send invoices to customers who are likely to add gratuity.
I have attempted the Zoho Checkout and cannot seem to be able to create a page that fits our needs. I found the following issues:
- Clients will have to type the amount in
- Amounts will add the default tax group (unlike Books that I can set the tax entity for each individual invoice)
- If payment page is set as non-taxable, it requires exemption and not sure how that will impact everything else I use in Zoho Books
- When payment is successfully submitted by client, the invoice is not automatically mark as paid
- Using Checkout for tips only is not ideal as users would then submit a payment in Books for the invoice and another one in Checkout
This is a very basic function that we should not need to hire anyone or write code to accomplish. It is an important and basic requirement that Zoho should prioritize.
The biggest inconvenience is asking the customer to visit another page just for gratuity. This should be automatically an option embedded within the invoice - not just a link to the gratuity / Checkout page. Would greatly appreciate the Zoho team working on resolving this.
that tip option is still a terrible route to go. I'm looking into switching softwares to be able to have a useful and easy method for customers to leave tips for my lawn customer invoices. I hate to switch all my data after 5 years with Zoho.
Hi Terry, I don't disagree with you. At this current time the other option may be to simply add a hyperlink for tips and then set a workflow to issue a separate invoice/receipt to cover the tip paid so the customer has this for their records.
As always if there's currently a development requirement we can only offer alternative solutions as a work-around until the feature is picked up by the dev team.
Why does ZOHO ignore the feature requests? A decade later I am still waiting for the most basic things. Ability to add a tip and partial payments on Retainer Invoices. Why do you continue coming out with thousands of new apps but don't improve the ones you have?