This article walks you through the steps needed to set up Slate Payments in your database.

Before you begin

Required reading

Before you begin, see Charging Payments in Slate Using Interactions and Activities to learn how Slate uses activities and interactions to facilitate the payment process.

Mixing and matching payment providers

Slate lets you configure any payment gateway to apply only to particular payment fee types (that is, payment account prompts), or particular rounds or periods, or both.

For example, you might have Slate Payments collect your application fee and then use another, external payment provider to collect an enrollment deposit.

If you choose to go this route, pay special attention to the instructions in Step 3.

📖 Further reading: Migrating to Slate Payments

Step 1: Add permissions

Assign the Payment Gateway Setup permission to a trusted user. This is an exclusive permission, meaning it must be explicitly granted. It cannot be inherited from any role, including the Administrator role.

Restrict using this permission as much as possible; someone who has this permission can enter bank account data to route payments to a destination account. To help audit this process, we automatically email your Slate security administrators whenever a new destination bank account is added.

Step 2: Create deposit account

Creating a Slate Payments deposit account

A deposit account represents the “end point” of the payment process, and is a holding account where the collected funds end up before being transferred to your external bank account.

📝 Note

If you are attempting to add a new deposit account located in Japan or the UAE, please reach out to us via a Support ticket. Non-standard accounts may require manual intervention from Technolutions staff to help create the account or seed certain information.

To add a Slate Payments deposit account:

1. Select Database on the Slate navigation bar. The Database page appears.

2. In the Payments section, select Slate Payments.  The Slate Payments page appears.

   

3. Select New Account. A Deposit Account popup appears.

   

4. Provide the required description, contact, banking, and verification information.

For details regarding the individual fields, refer to the Details on Account Fields section of this article.

📝 Note

When you use Slate Payments, we create a “custom connect account” on our Stripe Connect payments platform on your behalf. At this time, we are not able to support linking Slate Payments with a previously existing, standalone Stripe account; the managed Connected Account must be used.

Using Slate Payments requires agreement to the Stripe Terms of Service; Technolutions manages the relationship with Stripe, and all confidentiality and data security provisions included in your Technolutions MSA continue to apply.

After the initial save of the account, you will be asked for further verification information, including the institution's official legal name, EIN number, organization representatives, and more. A Stripe-hosted verification process will handle this final phase of the account onboarding process. Additional verification issues or messages will be displayed there.

Organization representative

When setting up a Slate Payments account, a Slate administrator (or another designated representative) must enter personal information for an Organization Representative or executive.

Providing personal information about an institution representative is required for the back-end payment processors to comply with regulations of the Office of Foreign Asset Control and "Know your customer" laws intended to prevent money laundering and other misuse of the financial system. There are no responsibilities and there is no liability involved. The identity information is only used during the initial verification. The organization representative will not be contacted.

📝 Note

This information is recorded at Stripe (on a Stripe page), not in your Slate database. No Slate users can access this information.

In most cases, Stripe asks for contact information of an executive or senior manager of the organization acting as a representative to comply with the federal Beneficial Ownership Rule which states, "covered financial institutions must identify each beneficial owner by obtaining their name, date of birth, address, and identifying number (such as a social security number or other identifying number permissible under the CIP rule), and verify their identities."

Some nonprofit organizations may not have encountered such a requirement before. While nonprofit entities—whether or not tax-exempt—that are established as a nonprofit, or nonstock corporation, or similar entity that has been validly organized with the proper State authority are excluded from the ownership/equity prong of the requirement because nonprofit entities generally do not have ownership interests, Financial institutions, are still required to collect beneficial ownership information under the control prong from any such entity. Just because you don't fill out ownership or share info, doesn't mean you are not required to supply contact data for a representative who "controls" or directs the operations of the entity on a day-to-day basis.

If you are seeing confusing labels during verification when attempting to add a contact, this might be due to an incorrect setup of the organization in Stripe as a private corporation rather than a nonprofit entity.

Test mode account

🔔Important: Test Mode Accounts

In most cases, the Test Mode Account checkbox should not be selected. Instead, you should set up a real, production-mode account using your real bank routing and account number; then testing your setup in a “test configuration” as described in Step 3 of this article.

A typical situation for using a “test mode account” is when you need to see the process before deciding on adopting Slate Payments. A “test mode account” can never be changed to production mode, and is only ever used for testing.

Real deposit accounts can only be created in your production database, but they can be “migrated” to the test environment (by provisioning a new Test environment) and used there in a “test configuration,” if desired.

When creating a Test Mode account, you must use the following test bank account:

• Routing number: 110000000

• Account number: 000123456789

You must still step through the Stripe-based account verification and supply all information about the organization and the individual representative (even if you just use test information: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/testing#verification).

Please see the following section for further details on specific fields and options displayed during this step.

Details on account fields

In the Banking and Payment Information section, the value entered in the Short Name to Appear on Bank Transfers field will appear on the payer’s credit card statement. Making this name as clear as possible will help prevent disputed charges resulting from not understanding the payment, so include an abbreviated version of your institution’s name.

Statement details

• Statement Descriptor: A short description of the charge that will appear on the payer’s card statement. Do not include (internal) references to ‘Slate’ in this field. The card or bank account owners need to be able to recognize the charge is coming from you.

• Statement Support Email: An email address made available to payers for help. There should be someone in your office available to respond to questions that involve your processes, not just payments (such as refunds, waivers or deposits). This is often a shared mailbox or distribution list.

• Statement Support Phone: A phone number made available to payers for help. Again, this should be someone who can assist with procedural questions or refund requests.

• Internal Notification Email for Disputes: Used for disputed charges, issues with transfers into your external bank account, and verification problems. This could be someone in a financial office. It should generally not be the same address that is used for payment issues (above).

Banking and payment information

Step 3: Connect deposit accounts to payment account prompts

Once you have created one (or more) deposit accounts, you must connect them to a particular payment_account prompt value (or make it the default for all payment types) to tell Slate that payments of a certain type should be processed through a particular deposit account (aka Stripe Connect account).

• Person-Scoped Payments get connected via the Person-Scoped Payment Configuration page. (Database > Payments > Person-Scoped Payment Configuration).

• Application-Scoped Payments get connected through the Application Editor:

1. Select Database on the Slate navigation bar. The Database page appears.

2. In the Applications section, select Application Editor. The Application Editor page appears.

3. Select the desired application configuration (round and/or period). If you have multiple applications configured, you must perform this configuration step for each one individually, however, you can use the same deposit account for multiple applications or payment accounts.
   If you do not have any application configuration listed, you might need to use the Slate Template Library to add a Slate-hosted application file (base.xml file). Even you are not using a Slate-hosted application, you will need the base xml file to configure application-scoped payments (e.g. you import applications, but want to enable the collection of enrollment deposit payments after releasing decisions).

4. When editing a particular configuration, a list of ‘application pages’ appears, followed by a list of modules. Locate the item with a Part ID of payment, followed by other items for payment_ plus various possible payment accounts. These will correspond to the payment_account prompt values that you have added to your database. To configure a default (or fallback) where all payment type are routed to the same deposit account, select the main "payment" item.

5. To configure Slate Payments for a particular payment account, select the list item for that prompt value. For example, to configure the deposit account for application fees, select the "payment_Application Fee" list item (see also the note at the end of this article). The module details will appear.
   

   📝 Note

   To add new payment accounts, add new prompt values with a key of "payment_account".

6. Select Payment Providers. An Edit Configuration popup appears.
   

   

   

3.5: Set a payment account + deposit account combination to “test configuration”

In the configuration pop-up from step-6 above:

1. Select Slate Test for Payment Provider. Additional options appear to provide a Slate payment deposit account (established in the steps described earlier in this article) and its associated settings.

2. Select the correct account for Slate Payment Deposit Account.

3. Configure the remaining settings as desired, such as enabling/disabling ‘checking account’ and ‘card payments’.

4. Consider adding custom text as supporting dispute evidence that will be automatically sent to the payer's bank or card issuer should a payer/user dispute a charge of this type.

5. Select Save.

Slate Payments is now enabled in a test configuration, enabling you to simulate the collection of test payments via the chosen deposit account.

Step 4: Testing the payment configuration

To quickly test the payment configuration itself (i.e. you are just making sure that the setup is accurate), manually add a Payment Due activity with the appropriate payment account to a test person record or test application. Select the ‘Payment link’ in the activity pop-up window. This will take you to the (built-in) payment page. When a payment succeeds, you should see a Payment Received activity on the record.

This initial testing procedure is quick and very convenient to ensure that the baseline setup is correct. Later, you may e.g. set up one or more payment rules and test the remaining parts of your application fee process, configure a reply form for your enrollment deposits, or create specific registration forms that collect event fees, gifts, or donations.

When your payment configuration is set to "Slate Test", you can make payments using the following test credit cards or bank accounts.

Test Credit Cards

For all test credit cards, you may enter any expiration date in the future, and any card verification code you like.

• You can test a declined card by using the Visa number 4000000000000002.

• To test ACH/Check payments, use the routing number 110000000, and the account number 000123456789.

• To test a failed check payment, use the account number 000222222227.

Step 5: Set deposit accounts to production mode

Moving to production mode

When you have verified that payments are working as expected, you can switch one or more of your Slate Payments Deposit Accounts to be used in production mode. In the Application Editor (or Person-Scoped Payment Configuration), repeat the procedure in Step 3, but this time select the payment provider as "Slate" instead of "Slate Test."

As part of your go-live planning, review the payment system emails configuration and made any required changes. For more information, refer to the System Emails for Slate Payments Knowledge Base article.

Payment provider: Slate

Consider conducting a real-money test transaction of at least $0.50 to verify that everything is operating as expected and that funds arrive in the correct account.

System notifications for Slate Payments

Slate will automatically send notification emails as they relate to Slate Payments based on a set of triggers. Many of these mailings can be customized. Some emails must be explicitly configured using Deliver to enable sending. Refer to the System Emails for Slate Payments Knowledge Base article for details regarding the content of automatically configured mailings, and the cases where automatic Slate Payments emails can be customized.

Migrating (fully or partially) from an existing external payment integration to Slate Payments

Refer to the Migrating to Slate Payments Knowledge Base article for information regarding the migration of external payment providers to Slate Payments.