CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I've been chatting with Dave Greenberg about whether there is any interest in putting direct debit batches for ACH transactions in core (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Direct+Debit+and+Direct+Credit+-+Monthly+Batches). He hasn't heard much in the way of expressions of interest in this from the community, so I'm very likely to move to a Drupal module implementation similar to http://fuerstnet.de/en/preview-direct-debit-payment-processor-civicrm-and (thanks, Bernhard Fürst!).

Before doing so I just wanted to canvass folks on whether they know of other organizations using this method. In Canada it is quite common amongst larger non-profits due to the cost savings. For an organization taking in a few million per year, credit card charges might amount to 2.6 percent plus the transaction fees, while the fees for bank transfers are per transaction and do not include a percent of the value. The result is that one of my clients needs an average donation size about $4 more to come out even when using a credit card versus a direct debit. At least five of my Canadian clients use direct debit batch services.

In Canada it tends to be the larger and older non-profits that use direct debit batches as one of their forms of processing, which isn't CiviCRM's current sweet spot of under $3M in revenue. Are these economics and usages unique to Canada, or do larger organizations in other countries also use monthly direct debit services?

All of my clients who use CiviCRM currently use direct debit ( ie ACH in the US) as a significant part of how they collect money.  In many cases, ACH is used for about 80% of their revenue.   

Currently its a major hassle as they have to manually enter ACH payments into CiviCRM.

The UI we're building for phase I of this project is for recurring donations, but the export and import of batches can support one time donations. The client wants to eventually support one-time donations with this processor as well.

There are two implementations we have considered for one-time donations being sent to a direct debit batch processor. The easiest one for us to implement phase I is just to reuse our approach for recurring donations but have staff specify a single recurrence. This won't be adequate later when CiviCRM is exposed to donors as well as staff. An alternative we may implement then (or even now) is to create an additional status 'To be submitted' status for civicrm_contribution records. Once the batch has been exported for submission to the processor, it would be changed to 'Pending'.

Comments on these implementation approaches welcome.

Hi bb-admin,

For immediately processed direct debit transactions you likely want to look at the work of the UK Direct Debit MIH folks. I also have a sense that there may be support right now for ACH in one of the American payment processors.

This thread is about doing monthly batch uploads of files to a payment processor of data on recurring transactions that are exported from CiviCRM. Not quite the same thing.