About Transaction Fees
Billing is an important piece of the Coworks platform. Coworks will automatically generate invoices and bill your customers on a recurring basis to collect revenue.
Learn more about auto-drafting payments here.
Each transaction incurs a transaction fee that Coworks allows you to pass on to your members (see here). However, if a recurring invoice is set to be emailed instead of charged automatically (which can happen intentionally or as a result of a failed attempt to process a payment), it is sometimes unclear what the standard behavior should be for transaction fees. This is because it is unclear how the customer intends to pay (credit card, bank, check, etc.) before the invoice is sent. We only know how they paid after the payment is sent.
This is why we've added the ability for you to set the default behavior of how emailed invoices should act.
Changing the transaction fee settings
To change your transaction fee settings, go to the "Community" tab in the lefthand sidebar of your Coworks dashboard. Under the top level "Settings" tab, you should see a section for "Billing" on the left side. Navigate there directly using this link.
There is a dropdown labeled "Emailed Invoice Fee Behavior for Membership Invoices". Here, you can choose whether to pass transaction fees by default for emailed invoices. Your options for what types of fees to pass (bank account or credit card fees) will be determined by the two toggles above the dropdown.
How to set transaction fee behavior for emailed invoices This setting is only for automatically generated invoices and NOT one-off manually created invoices (you will have the option to pass fees or not at the time of invoice creation for those).
Passing fees by default will ensure that all emailed recurring invoices are appended with transaction fees (even if, for example, a card fails and an invoice is sent, OR if you've purposefully set an invoice to be emailed instead of charged automatically). Otherwise, emailed invoices will NOT include transaction fees when generated automatically.
Paying via check/cash
Scenario: What if you want failed invoices that get emailed to have transaction fees, but you have a few members who pay you by check or by cash who should not be paying transaction fees?
For this scenario, you can go to the individual team and override the transaction fee settings to ensure that transaction fees aren't added. This will ignore your community transaction fee settings for that specific customer. You can learn how to set that up here.
Happy Coworking!