So you've set up billing in Coworks and you want to start collecting money. Coworks leverages Stripe, which allows you to collect money using 3 different payment sources.
Credit Cards - immediately charged and emailed invoices
Bank Accounts - one-off and automatically charged recurring invoices
ACH Transfers - emailed invoices
Note: Only bank accounts that are US-based or UK-based and in GBP are currently supported. Members without US bank accounts or UK bank accounts in GBP will need to use credit cards.
Credit Cards and Bank Accounts
Credit cards and Bank Accounts are valid capture-able sources. This means that you can collect these details from a member and store them for charging later through the dashboard. This is the preferred and recommended method for billing members and allows you the most flexibility in determining a payment schedule.
ACH Transfers
ACH Transfers are a bank account and routing number that Stripe automatically adds to emailed invoices so that members can initiate transfers of money from their bank account to yours (well, first to Stripe's Wells Fargo account, but it gets forwarded to yours!). This method creates several issues:
Members (while sent an invoice) can transfer any amount they want (more or less than the invoice amount), which causes an accounting mess. If they send less, the invoice isn't automatically marked paid and you must instruct them to send the deficit. If they send too much, the next invoice generated will deduct the extra. It can be a confusing scenario.
ACH Transfer account numbers are subject to change. If a member takes and stores your ACH transfer destination account, and you cancel & recreate their membership in the future, this bank account can change! This causes money sent by a member to end up in escrow and can cause a mess trying to track it down.
You have no control over when a member actual sends funds leading to unpredictable invoice collection times and leaving you chasing a member to pay their invoices.
If you do not want to use ACH transfers on emailed invoices, there is good news! You can disable ACH transfers on emailed invoices by following these steps. By turning off ACH transfers, you can still capture Bank Accounts for members and set those up to be recurrently billed.
Note: Bank accounts are not accepted on emailed invoices because they require a two-step verification process and bank accounts aren't verified immediately (and thus aren't chargeable).
Happy Coworking!