Payments and Stripe

Connect your Stripe account to let clients pay invoices online by card, ACH, or Cash App Pay. Payments go to your Stripe account; Stripe’s processing fees apply, and PayPolka adds no markup. Open Settings, Payments to follow these steps.

Connect your Stripe account

The Stripe card has three fields and a badge that reads Stripe not configured until all three are saved.

1. Publishable key, which starts with pk_.
2. Secret key, which starts with sk_. It’s encrypted at rest. Leave the field blank later to keep the key you have.
3. Webhook signing secret, which starts with whsec_. Also encrypted, also blank-to-keep.

To get the signing secret, copy the Webhook endpoint URL shown on the card and add it as an endpoint in your Stripe dashboard. Subscribe it to six events:

• checkout.session.completed
• payment_intent.succeeded
• payment_intent.payment_failed
• charge.refunded
• refund.updated
• refund.failed

If your endpoint was set up before refund.failed was on this list, add it in Stripe so a refund that fails puts the invoice back the way it was.

Stripe then gives you the signing secret. Paste it back and save. The badge changes to Stripe connected.

payment_intent.succeeded is how a bank transfer clears. Skip it and ACH payments sit at pending clearance for good.

Test Stripe connection asks Stripe for the linked account and tells you whether the saved key works. Save first; it tests the stored key, not what’s in the box.

If Stripe payments came in during the last 30 days, the card warns you before you rotate the secret key. Payments taken under the old key belong to the old Stripe account and can’t be refunded from the new one. Changing the secret key also removes every client’s saved autopay method, since those belong to the old Stripe account too; clients set autopay up again from their portal.

Choose payment methods

The Payment Methods card has four checkboxes:

• Credit card
• Bank transfer (ACH)
• Cash App Pay
• Cash / Check

There’s no per-invoice override. An invoice reads the account’s methods each time its public page loads, so a method you turn on today appears on invoices you sent last month.

The three online methods only work once Stripe is connected. Until then the public invoice page shows no Pay online card. Your payment page shows only your cash and check instructions if you have them, and otherwise the link shows a not found page.

Cash and check instructions

Fill in Cash / check instructions with whatever a client needs: who to make the check out to, where to mail it, how to hand over cash. The text shows on the public invoice page under Payment instructions whenever Cash / Check is on, and on your payment page under “Prefer to pay by cash or check?”.

Cash and check are offline. A client can press Report payment sent on the invoice, which emails you a notice, but the balance only moves when you record the payment yourself. See Getting paid.

Pass processing fees to clients

The checkbox Pass online payment processing fees to clients adds Stripe’s fee on top of what the client pays. Card and Cash App Pay add 2.9% plus $0.30. ACH adds 0.8%, capped at $5.

When it’s on, the public invoice page shows a small breakdown before the client clicks: Invoice balance, Processing fee, and Total to pay. The Pay button carries the grossed-up amount. Because the client picks the method inside Stripe Checkout, the fee quoted on an invoice uses the most expensive method you allow, so you always net the full balance.

On the payment page the client picks the method first, so the fee there is exact for that method, with a live breakdown of the amount, the fee, and the total under the payment methods.

The invoice itself never changes. The payment records what was credited to the invoice and, separately, the fee the client covered. Both show on the invoice’s Payments table (”+ $X fee covered”) and roll up under Payment Processing in Accounting.

The payment page

Your account’s standing payment URL, app.paypolka.com/pay/your-slug, sits under Payment page with a Copy button. What clients see there is in Public pages and client portal.

Reminder schedule

The Payment Reminders card has a master switch, Send reminder emails for unpaid invoices, and a Reminder schedule (days) field. Enter comma-separated offsets from the due date: negative is before, zero is on the day, positive is after. The default is -3, 0, 3, 7, 14.

Each invoice has its own switch too, on by default.

Connected and configured? Getting paid walks through what the client sees next.