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Using QuickBooks Online to email a Stripe credit card payment link

April 9, 2024 Gabriel WordPress

QuickBooks Online offers a convenient online payment option that Intuit would love to have you use. That’s because they can charge a credit card processing fee that is not necessarily competitive. QuickBooks Online does not give you an option to accept credit card payments using any other processor.

Stripe.com and Authorize.net are popular 3rd party credit card processors that offer competitive transaction fees. In particular, we like Stripe.com because there are no monthly charges.

QuickBooks Online does integrate with 3rd party apps that can aggregate your invoices and then send them out with 3rd party payment links but they come with expensive monthly usage fees and have a cumbersome workflow.

How can I make QuickBooks Online email a custom invoice payment link to my customers?

We built a simple form on our WordPress website that accepts credit card payments via Stripe. The payment amount field is automatically populated by a query variable in the URL. For instance, a payment link for a $100.00 invoice would look like this:

The trick is getting QuickBooks Online to dynamically insert the customer’s balance into the body of the email so we can create the payment URL without customizing it each time you send an invoice.

I scoured the internet looking for solutions and was frustrated to see the number of people asking the same question with no answers.

A QuickBooks Online invoice email variable that displays the customer’s balance due

Eventually, I found a single variable that does just what I need: [BALANCE_DUE]

Inserting [BALANCE_DUE] into the QuickBooks Online invoice email template will dynamically add the customer’s balance to the email.

I use that variable to craft my dynamic URL and send customers to our custom payment form. Here’s what it looks like:

Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find any other variables (like invoice number) that work with Quickbooks Online.

If you’d like to let your QuickBooks Online customers pay with the payment gateway/processor of your choice, get in touch and we can help build a payment form and add a pay-now link to your QuickBooks Online invoice emails!

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