After requesting whether the Stripe integration includes support for recurring transactions, particularly with respect to customers not having to re-enter their details for every payment and discovering that this is not yet implemented, I’d like to request the feature.
Summary:
If a customer does not yet have an automated Stripe payment profile set up for settling the fees of their recurring invoices, prompt them to enter their credit card details.
There should be a default ticked option, confirming that they approve ongoing, automatic payments to occur, without having to re-enter their details again.
If they’d prefer to manually enter their credit card details each time, then they’re able to remove the ticked option.
Disclosure:
I have no experience with using Stripe yet, so my assumptions of its features may be inaccurate.
I’ve subsequently seen that the GoCardless transaction fees are lower than Stripe’s and I’d be able to use FreeAgents GoCardless integration for recurring payments.
Perhaps this is the solution for those who haven’t yet set up an account with either.
For businesses with established Stripe accounts already would obviously benefit from this feature.
Thanks for reaching out to us on this, it’s always great to hear requests on how we could better things.
As you’ve seen, Stripe is used for accepting debit and credit card payments whilst GoCardless is for direct debit mandates. The improvement you suggest (allowing customer’s to accept recurring automated payments), is not something that we support, and being honest, I don’t know if that is something that Stripe allow, let alone make the functionality available via their API for us to adopt too.
Nevertheless, I shall certainly pass this request on to the relevant Product team that handles our Stripe integration, so that it will be considered.
I have also emailed Stripe support for more information on whether they might support recurring payments via their API in future.
The challenge for my business, is that we have many customers in countries outside of those supported by GoCardless, so credit card transactions are still a necessity.
As of writing this, I don’t know whether FreeAgent might support dual integrations - ie. GoCardless for some customers and Stripe for others. That may help with spreading the integration costs.
The recurring payments feature would be very useful, I came over fro Wave and they had it for years and so does Xero. So I don’t think it comes down to if Stripe will enable their API, I think it comes down to will FreeAgent implement this feature.
A lot of our customers are outside of the UK, so they cannot use GoCardless, and for them having to send a payment every month is a pain. They would rather just be auto charged on Stripe.
Please look into this as I love FreeAgent, but I may have to switch to another platform if this integration cannot happen.
I can’t understand how it’s 2022 and Freeagent hasn’t implemented this to stay relevant and current with all the other providers out there.
I’ve been with Freeagent for years, but this absence of automated Stripe recurring billing / subscriptions has really been a massive thorn in my side, and I suspect a big complaint of many others too.
Freeagent, this needs to be a priority feature upgrade. Please consider this soon, or I’m also out.
Hey Richard,
I am looking at using Invoice Ninja for the recurring profiles with Stripe it also works with GoCardless. It’s not an accounting solution. Take a look.
Let’s see if FreeAgent pulls their finger out with this one.
Best wishes,
Martin
I’m Steven, one of the support engineers here at FreeAgent I’m really sorry we’ve taken so long to get back to you! We really appreciate your feedback on how we can improve and always do our best to provide the most up to date features.
I can definitely see the case for recurring payments with Stripe and so I understand your frustration at the lack of support for this. I have now spoken with the relevant product manager and passed on your request for this feature making them aware of this thread. They have confirmed the request has been logged and will be reviewed in due course by the engineering team responsible.
In addition to reviewing your request, I also thought you might like to know that FreeAgent is planning on investigating the whole breadth of payment provider options this year as we have identified this as an area with significant potential for improvement to the user experience.
Are you able to provide a time-line for Stripe/other recurring payment integrations? Revolut would be another very lucrative candidate for this. I’m evaluating both Stripe and Revolut for my business.
The development and compliance overhead of having to become PCI compliant to facilitate subscription based transactions with FreeAgent is high. Looking at alternatives to FreeAgent might be the most sensible way forward.
The discussion so far has been about starting with recurring invoices in FreeAgent, and wanting to get corresponding recurring charges in Stripe.
If it’s viable for your situation, it might be worth considering the reverse: get your customer to subscribe to a plan in Stripe, perhaps using Stripe Billing or Stripe Checkout in your app, and then create corresponding invoices in FreeAgent.
How would you automatically create an invoice in FreeAgent each time there is a charge/invoice in Stripe? One way would be using a webapp I wrote called DoubleAgent. It also reconciles all your Stripe fees and so on.
I apologise for the self-promotion but I only mention it because it might help someone here.
I’m really sorry we’ve taken so long to get back to you! We really appreciate your feedback on how we can improve and always do our best to provide the most up to date features.