How do I get my payers to pay me via pre-approval?

Pre-approved payments are the best type of payments to process as they easily increase cashflow and have a very low administrative effort to process. A pre-approval is active when your payer stores their debit/credit card or bank account on file with our system so we can securely store it for later use. When an invoice is due, we can debit your payer automatically on the due date.

Getting payers onto pre-approvals includes a couple of steps

1. Setting up the email template to send
2. Sending pre-approvals to your payers
3. Receiving confirmation that a pre-approval is now active

We'll go through these steps below

Step 1 - Configure the email template

From the main Pinch menu, select "Config" and then click on the "Emails" tab. You'll see something similar to below:

There are 2 types of email you can configure. The pre-approval request is the email you send to payers inviting them to store their payment details. Pre-approval confirmation is the email we send to your payer when they confirm the pre-approval.

Although every business is different, our general advice for these templates is to include as much detail about the arrangement as possible. Also try to put yourself in the shoes of your payer. Maybe you issue lots of invoices and your payer currently spends lots of time manually paying them. For subscription based payments, having a regular Direct Debit ensures that a service is not interrupted.

You can also attach a PDF to the emails. This is also advised and most often contains terms and conditions or additional information about the service.

Step 2 - Send pre-approvals

From the main Pinch menu, click on "Payers" and then "Manage Pre-approvals". From this page, select the payers and we'll send out the email you configured in step 1. Note that we require an email address from each payer. If you need to update their details, use your accounting system and the data will automatically flow down to Pinch.

Step 3 - Receive confirmation

Congratulations! When you receive confirmation from us that a payer has entered a pre-approval we can start debiting them automatically on the invoice due date!