Hello Seller Community!
For many businesses — whether they are florists who deliver weekly arrangements or yoga studios looking to charge for classes — recurring payments (or recurring billing) is a great way to save time and get paid faster. Instead of having to create identical invoices week after week, you can streamline your bookkeeping by setting up recurring payments.
Setting up recurring payments is easy and Square offers multiple ways to manage them. In this post, we will walk you through how to set up recurring payments that will best suit your business needs.
What recurring payment options does Square offer?
With Square, you can set up recurring payments with either Square Invoices or Square Online Checkout Links.
You can create Square Invoices directly from your online Square Dashboard or from the Square Point of Sale app on a mobile device and send them directly to your customer as an email.
Set up Square Checkout Links by creating links from your online Square Dashboard. You can then share the links with your customers via text and email, add to your social media, or embed them in your website.
What are the fees for recurring payment?
The fee for processing recurring payments with Square Invoices and Square Checkout Links is 2.5% per transaction.
How can I set up recurring payments with Square Invoices?
It’s pretty straightforward to set up recurring payments with Square Invoices. To do so:
- Go to Invoices in your online Square Dashboard.
- Select Create Invoice.
- Select Recurring from the drop down menu.
- Specify the frequency of the payments.
- Click Automatic Payments if you want to bill customers with a card on file automatically.
- Select a customer from your Customer Directory, or enter a new name and email address. You can enter up to nine recipients.
- If your customer doesn’t have a payment card on file, you can check the box next to Allow customer to save their card.
- Fill out the rest of the invoice, including any discounts.
- Check the Allow Customer to Add a Tip box at the bottom, if appropriate.
- Click Schedule.
How can I set up recurring payments with Square Checkout Link?
From the Online Checkout menu item on the left of your Square dashboard, create a new checkout link or edit an existing one to get started. Choose either Collect payments or Accept donations as your link purpose.
Enter a title and the amount you want to charge, then adjust the frequency of the payment on the right. You can choose weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or more.
Once you click Create link, a unique link URL is auto-generated for you. Paste the link on an existing website, social post, email, or text message to share it with your customers.
Learn more about how to manage your Checkout Link subscription from our Product Update.
I’m using Square Invoices for my subscription and saw that the invoice was cancelled but I didn’t do this. What happened?
When you send an invoice to your customers, they get a few attempts to put in the right payment information (card number, expiration date, etc.). If the card fails after those attempts, you and your customers will receive an email notifying you that the transaction has failed. The recurring series stays intact and will continue to send the next instances in that series, but you will have to resend a single invoice if you want to re-try getting payment for the invoice instance that failed.
Please make sure to read up on how to protect your business from fraud. You can also find our FAQ on why payments may be declined on our Seller Community.
I’m using Card on File — what happens if my customer’s card is out of date?
If the Card on File for the customer has expired, Square will automatically send out the invoice to them via email so they can enter their new details. Both you and the customer will be notified that the current Card On File was not charged.
