Salesforce Billing: Payment Methods

In the previous blog posts, we discussed the scenario where a check comes through mail, and the user goes in and creates a Payment record, changes it to Posted, and then creates the Payment Allocations against the necessary Invoice Lines. This is the manual process.

However, when using electronic payments through the Payment Gateway functionality, we have the ability to automate these steps.

The Payment Gateway is an object within Salesforce Billing. It allows us to connect Salesforce Billing with an outside financial institution (bank or credit card company) via intermediate third-party vendors.

You can have multiple Payment Gateways set up. Most customers use only one vendor but some customers use multiple vendors.

Once you have a Payment Gateway set up, you can set up a Payment Method. The Payment Method object is used to define the ACH (automated clearing house) or credit card detail for a given Account. Thus, it has a look up to the Account and a look up to the Payment Gateway telling us that a certain Payment Method should be used against a specific Payment Gateway.

The payment method for ACH can be created by clicking the New button on the Payment Method related list on the Account record. Alternatively, you can do it via the Payment Method tab. Note that it's required to fill in the ACH Details. 

For Credit Cards, you should use the New Payment Method Credit Card button. 

When you add a new credit card to the account, Salesforce doesn't store any credit card information. It only stores the information received back from the payment vendor in tokenized format (only the last four digits are shown) which ensures PCI compliance (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). So, AHC information is stored more explicitly while credit card details are tokenized.

AHC or credit card Payment Methods would further be used within the Payment Center to create Payment records and related Payment Allocations with just a few clicks.