What you need

Pay links work when your website takes card payments through Square, Braintree or Stripe (Settings › Selling Options › Payment Gateways). The payment page is part of your own website, so a BookRouter account without a website cannot offer pay links yet. Without them, reminders and requests still go out, just without the Pay Now button.

Sending a pay link

Open an open or partly paid invoice (from View Sales, Sales & Customers › Invoices, the customer's Invoices tab, the Open Invoices report or All Sales) and use its More menu:

• Copy pay link puts the link on your clipboard, to paste into your own email, a text message or a chat.
• Email sends the invoice to the customer. Leave Include a "Pay Now" link ticked and the email carries a Pay Now button.
• Send reminder sends a payment reminder with the Pay Now button (see below).

What your customer sees

The link opens a payment page on your website with your store's name, the invoice number and the balance due right now: after a partial payment, the page asks only for the rest. They enter their card, pay and see a confirmation. Opening the link again after paying says the invoice is paid; nobody can pay the same invoice twice. Once an invoice is paid, cancelled or refunded, its link stops working.

After a payment

• The payment is recorded on the invoice, with the card transaction attached, so it can be refunded to the card from View Sales like any card payment.
• You receive an email saying the invoice was paid.
• A partly paid invoice keeps its link for the balance.

Reminders and overdue notices

In an open invoice, choose More › Send reminder. Pick the kind of message (a friendly payment reminder or a firmer overdue notice), check the recipient, and adjust the subject and wording for this one send if you like. The preview shows exactly what the customer will receive. The invoice window then shows when it was last reminded, and to whom.

On the Open Invoices report, the bell on each row sends a reminder for that invoice, and Remind Overdue (Admins) sends an overdue notice to every overdue invoice that has an email address, after showing you how many will go. An invoice already reminded in the last 7 days is skipped, so pressing it twice does not pester anyone.

Requesting a payment

Need to collect money that is not on an invoice yet: a deposit on a special order, a shipping difference, an appraisal fee? Request payment asks for the customer, the amount and what it is for, then creates a one-line invoice with a pay link, and can email the request to the customer in the same step. You will find the button on the Open Invoices report, on All Sales and on a customer's Invoices tab. It needs invoicing to be turned on.

Changing the wording

The standard wording of the three messages (payment reminder, overdue notice, payment request) is under Settings › Branding & Templates › Message Templates (Admins). Edit the subject and message; the invoice details and the Pay Now button are filled in for each customer. Click Save Message; Reset to default returns a message to the standard wording. In the Send reminder window, Save as template does the same from there, so the wording you just wrote is used for every later reminder of that kind.