Managing the Payment Step

Depending on what type of payment you are adding to a form, you may need to manage your Payment Step. Common items to manage are: 

• Recording cash or check payments
• Waiving a payment
• Adding an additional payment

Recording Cash or Check Payments 

Admin View

If your form has one or more payment steps and they've been set up to accept cash and/or check payments, you'll need to record that those payments have been received in order for a submission to move forward.

For example, you can enter the check payment by confirming the Amount Received of the check, the Check Number, and selecting Check Received to move the submission forward.

Applicant View

When an applicant selects the check payment type, they'll then see a message that informs them that they'll be held on the step until the check is received and recorded. ClearForms automatically sends them an email to let them know when their check has been entered into the system. 

Waiving a Payment

It is possible to completely waive a required payment as part of a submission. Perhaps the applicant is the longest-tenured business in your community, or a nonprofit organization may not be required to pay a facility rental fee. For whatever reason, if you have to waive a payment that is normally required, we've created the opportunity for you to do that.

Find the specific submission on your dashboard you want to waive a payment from and select the submission. Navigate to the payment step of the submission. Then select in the upper right of the payment step, Waive payment.

A Payment Waived message will appear on the screen and the applicant will be able to go through the Payment step without paying.

Pro Tip: Want to change your mind? Select Require payment and the application will be back to the standard payment status.

Pro Pro Tip: If you find yourself waiving payments frequently, you may want to (or you may want to ask your form admin if you don't have edit privileges) to adjust your form questions and formula to account for the conditions that result in waived payments.  For example, if you want to always waive payments for nonprofits, you could ask whether the applicant was a nonprofit organization and then build a formula with 0$ payment associated with that answer to a multiple choice question.  For more on how to use formula values with multiple-choice fields, read this overview.

Requesting Additional Payment 

Most of the time when you're using ClearForms to collect permit or license fees from applicants, the applicant pays a standard fee.  Sometimes this fee is fixed and sometimes it's calculated automatically by the  Formulas feature.

Yet sometimes you need to add an additional payment into a submission.  Perhaps you realize that an applicant never paid a previous year's business license fee, and must do so to renew.  Or perhaps you want to assess a late fee, or the parameters of an application changed after a fee was paid.

Using the Request an additional payment feature at any time during a submission, you can utilize this feature via the Menu link (top right when an individual application is open).

Select the Request an additional payment (a one-time option specific to an individual submission) to begin the request submission.

1. Set the name of Payment Requirement Step, like Late Fee.
2. Add a brief description/reason for requesting the additional payment. 
3. Select Flat or Payer determined for Payment Amount. 
4. Choose all the appropriate Payment Settings such as allowing for cash or check payment or passing transaction fees on to constituents.  

Finally, select the Send Request button and notify the applicant that they won't be able to continue along in their submission without completing the additional payment.