Online Booking Payments/Deposits

Online Booking Payments is a feature that needs to be enabled & configured by the SOE team.
To find out more, submit your enquiry to our Best Practice Consultant team.  

Stripe is the payment handler of the deposits and this is where the money initially goes when a patient pays a deposit online. After a maximum of 7 working days the money is processed into the nominated bank account that has been linked with Stripe.

• Recalls & Planned appointments booked online via links sent to patients will currently offer no deposit option.
• Deposits should only be taken for private patients booking through online booking.
• For NHS UK customers, NHS patients should not pay deposits for their treatment.

When does the Patient See the Deposit?

The patient will see the value of the deposit when selecting the service they wish to book in for then again on the last screen after entering their details.

Monitoring your Online Deposits

Via Stripe. If you click on the ‘Payments’ tab of your Stripe account this will display a list of all the Online Deposits and their status along with the email address the customer used to book online. In the ‘description’ field there will be a string of characters which is the unique authorisation ID for the payment.
Clicking on ‘Balance’ and then on ‘Transactions’ you will see how long these payments will take before they make it to the practice’s bank account and this includes the deduction of the service fee which is 1.4% +20p of the value of the deposit.

These payments are also logged in EXACT. On a patients records click the ‘£’ symbol and look for any payment with a payment method of .OLB in the Particulars column. Next to it will state the AuthID mentioned earlier.

These .OLB Online Deposits will also show on all the usual financial reports you use in Exact such as the ‘Cashing Up’ Report; they will be marked as .OLB payments.

Changing your prices/deposits

Go to Configure – Online Appointments – Web Setup – double click or select the ‘booking reason’ you need to change and click the e/d (edit) button – enter new price/deposits in their respective fields.
After this close out of all of the menus give the Online Booking about 5-10mins for the changes to register and then if you refresh your Online Booking page you should see the updated prices/deposits.

Refunding Online Deposits

If an Online Deposit is past the date in which Stripe holds the money and it is already in the practice’s bank then you would process the refund however you do so normally. You can check if the payment has gone into the practice’s bank account by going to ‘Balance’ and then ‘Transactions’, see above.
If the money is yet to transfer to the practice’s bank account and resides in Stripe’s holding account, then you can refund directly from Stripe.
It is in your benefit to do this as you will not incur the 1.4% + 20p service fee.

In Stripe, go to the ‘Payments’ screen, hover your cursor over the payment and click the reverse arrow symbol, a menu will pop up allowing you to put the refund amount and choose a reason as to why the refund is needed. The patient will receive the refund within 5-10 working days.
Please note if you refunded through Stripe, EXACT has no way of recording this so you’ll have to process the refund for the patient in EXACT as well. See: Processing Refunds

Issues with Online Deposits

You may see payments that are logged in Stripe as ‘Uncaptured’ as a result of this but you can click on these payments and choose to ‘Capture’ (take the payment) or ‘Release’ (refund the payment) it is to your own discretion how you would like to handle it.
If everything is running fine with Online Booking and everything is being recorded correctly within EXACT but you are having issues with deposits on Stripe then it will be Stripe support you would need to contact as it is likely an issue with the Stripe account. You can reach Stripe out to Stripe from the following link: https://support.stripe.com/

Accessing Stripe

https://dashboard.stripe.com/login
Please note – Software of Excellence has no access to customers Stripe accounts.  If you have had Online Deposits setup with us but cannot access your Stripe account then you will need to use the ‘forgot my password’ option on Stripe.

Stripe Support: https://support.stripe.com/