Recurring EFT for UK facility
Hey chaps,
We are looking at using RGP in our (UK) facility, but the major sticking point is that we need to do recurring billing via EFT which RGP doesn't support at this time.
How feasible is it to initiate the billing process via RGB, and then tap into the database directly to run through the required payments with an external payment provider, and save the results back to RGB?
(I have mySQL/PHP and integrating payment provider experience, so accessing the database and doing the transactions is easy enough - it's more the feasibility integrating this in RGP that my question is about...)
So ideally either getting RGP to post to an internal admin webpage with the account payment details, and get the results/authorisation sent back to RGP, or prepare the accounts for payment and use an admin webpage to loop through the accounts and process the payments directly.
Thanks for any advice in advance,
Comments
We do not support writing to the database. If you write to the database, you will absolutely cause problems and we cannot authorize or support it.
RGP does not store credit card information in its database due to PCI compliance - that all happens via its integrated third party solution. Thus you will need to manage the credit card #s in your own solution or third party system in this case.
What you can do is setup RGP in a way where you process a fake billing in RGP each month. It posts invoices and then you run a fake billing that "pays" the invoices. Nothing happens in RGP except the invoices are created and "paid" via a fake payment.
You run billing in your third party system (either by querying the RGP database - READ ONLY to get the payment amount OR just keeping the third party system manually in sync) and then just manually mark the declined payments in RGP.
It's not as bad as it sounds, even manually. It just requires you setup the member in RGP AND setup the member in the billing system initially. And only if the payment gets declined to you need to manually do anything at billing for that customer.
Perhaps in a year or so, once the booking system is done, we will investigate supporting a UK billing system.... but it is very complex because the credit card #s must be stored with them, not us for PCI compliance.
Also, here is a slightly more advanced technique...
You keep your own external database of payment details (credit card #, exp. date, etc.). You cannot and should not store those in RGP due to PCI compliance.
In RGP, members are setup with "ACH Billing" and you put your key to that data for the customer in one of the ACH fields. For example, the id# of the row for that customer's payment details in your *external* database of payment details.
In RGP, for your monthly billing you setup the "ACH Export" billing method.
Then monthly...
Post Invoices
Execute Billing
You now have a tab delimited file with customer name, amount, and your "key" to their payment details stored in a file.
Feed that file to your custom system that processes the payments.
Declines will need to happen manually, but for any decline you just mark that payment as declined in RGP. That step is manual but should only take a few minutes per month.
The short summary - use the ACH field in RGP as a pointer to the payment details and use the "ACH Export" billing method to produce a file that can be processed by your custom system.
Thanks Andy, that all sounds doable.
> If you write to the database, you will absolutely cause problems and we cannot authorize or support it.
Sure, I understand that.
Thanks for the pointers as to some of the best ways to handle it from the RGP side, this will give me a start on assessing the feasibility of doing this and how smoothly we can integrate things...
Hi Andy,
I've been trialling the system above for our UK gym.
1. I've set the customers up with EFT- Manual so that we don't have to add any bank details.
2. On the dues collection date we go to Billing Center and Select Post Dues.
3. We post the invoices. So far so good.
What do I do next? In the post above you say 'Execute Billing' but that option doesn't seem available to me.
I'm OK with manually sorting out any declined payments, but I don't want to have manually assign payments for each customer (we have 1000+ that pay this way).
What can I do next?
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