Paypal is a secure, trusted and popular payment method that clients love to use. Click here to get started with Paypal.
There are a number of settings that need to be in place in your PayPal account, to make sure that payments are successfully received and invoices updated in Timely.
Once you have connected your PayPal account to Timely, you will need to login to your PayPal account and adjust the following settings:
- Check your instant payment notification (IPN) settings.
- Remove any Sales taxes from PayPal.
- Update your preferences for blocking receiving payments.
- Allow guest checkout (payment via credit card).
These settings in Paypal can be found by heading to:
- Settings > Account settings.
- Or by following this link: https://www.paypal.com/businessmanage/account/accountAccess
- If you don't see either of these options, then you may be using a PayPal Personal account. Please upgrade to a Paypal Business account.
Check your instant payment notification (IPN) settings
To make sure that PayPal tells us when a customer has paid for their invoice, you need to enable Instant Payment Notifications.
If these aren't correctly set, we won't be notified that the payment was received and any appointments will be automatically removed from your calendar. Find out more in our How to restore expired online payments (PayPal) guide.
In your PayPal account:
- Click on your account name and select Account Settings:
- On the left-hand side click on Notifications followed by Update in the Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) section:
- Click on Choose IPN Settings (or Edit settings if you have an existing IPN setup):
- Update the URL to https://webhooks.gettimely.com/webhooks/paypal/ and ensure Receive IPN messages (Enabled) is checked and hit Save.
Remove any sales tax from PayPal
Tax will be automatically added to your sales, based on the taxes you've added to Timely. To prevent a double-up, you can remove the sales taxes from PayPal:
- Go to Settings > Account settings > Payment preferences or follow this link
- Click Update next to the Sales tax option
- Select any domestic or international sales taxes from the list.
- Click Delete and then OK to remove them.
Set your preferences for blocking and receiving payments
If you would like to request a deposit or partial payment for an online booking or invoice, you will need to allow this setting in PayPal. This will allow customers to pay the remainder of their balance online.
- Go to Settings > Account settings > Payment preferences or follow this link
- Click Update next to Block payments.
- Ensure that "Allow payments sent to me in a currency I do not hold" is set to Yes.
- Ensure that "Block accidental payments" is set to "No, allow multiple payments per invoice ID":
- Under the "Block the following payments:" section, check the box next to “Pay with eCheck or German bank transfer...”.This will load the Payment receiving preferences page:
- Click Save to apply your changes.
If you do not want/need to request deposits for bookings and want customers to pay for their service in full, then you will need to make sure that the Block accidental payments is set to Yes.
Enable guest checkout
There are another couple of settings that need to be in place to make sure payments are processed and received successfully:
- Go to Settings > Account settings > Website payments or follow this link.
- Click Update next to Website preferences:
- Make sure Auto return is set to Off.
- Set the Payment data transfer setting to Off.
- In the Block non-encrypted Website Payments section, select Off.
- Scroll down to the PayPal account optional section and set this to On (this will enable guest checkout that allows customers to pay via credit card, without having a PayPal account).
- Click Save to apply those changes.
Check out our Getting started with PayPal guide for step-by-step instructions.