Recurring Payment Processing: How to Automate With PayJunction

Welcome to PJ University, where we teach you how to use PayJunction like a pro. Today’s lesson is how to set up recurring payment processing.

It can be challenging to handle recurring payments efficiently and securely. If you aren’t able to store credit card information in your payment software, you’re likely requesting a signed authorization form and credit card information from your customers regularly. You may also be writing card information down on paper, but this is not PCI compliant.

With PayJunction, you can set up payment schedules to bill as often and long as you’d like. Without waiting on authorization from the customer or failing to maintain compliance.

Here’s how it works. From the main page, click “Recurring” and then “New Recurring” in the top right. Enter the card information, transaction information, set the schedule and input the billing contact info. Customers are emailed a recurring payment processing agreement to sign, which ensures you have ongoing authorization to bill customers’ cards on a specified schedule. This is convenient for customers, and protects your business from chargebacks.

You can also set up recurring payment processing from a customer contact card. Simply select the customer, choose the account to bill and click the “Recurring” button. The billing information will be pulled from the contact card.

Our system notifies you of any recurring payments that fail to go through so you can quickly resolve the issue and maintain your cash flow.

How the Virtual Terminal Makes Following-Up Easy

Because the Virtual Terminal automatically stores customer payment information upon initial entry, it makes it far easier to follow-up with customers. You don’t need a separate piece of software or address book with your customer information. Instead, you can store your customers’ email addresses and phone numbers in the system to make following-up with overdue customers a quick task.

All customer payment information is tokenized. A step above encryption, tokenization involves the complete replacement of credit card, debit card and ACH account data with a unique and random string that can only be decoded by the token vault at the final contact point of the transaction: the payment processor.

Even if a fraudster obtained the token, which could be a string such as EO5L-X03K-S2LX-79BQ for the card number 1234-5678-9123-4567, it would have no value to him. You and your employees can’t see the payment information, reducing your chances of internal fraud as well.

This all amounts to safe credit card processing and secure ongoing payment authorization, which is incredibly valuable for businesses with subscriptions or memberships. Imagine all the time your employees could save by not having to send out monthly authorization forms, waiting for checks in the mail or phone calls with payment information, along with trips to the bank.

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Editor's Note: This post was originally published in August 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness and accuracy.