Slate facilitates charging fees and collecting payments online. This process can be enabled and customized in a number of different ways. This articles describe the different parts of the process.

Be aware that for a complex payment setup (such as conditionally sending different values to an external payment processor, or a complex fee waiver process) you should plan ahead and begin the payment integration setup at least six weeks before go-live.

Slate Payments

Slate Payments, powered by the Stripe Connect platform, is our built-in payment processor. It is the most convenient choice for your payment needs in Slate and offers a seamless self-service setup experience.

You can use Slate Payments to collect a variety of payments (application fees, enrollment deposits, and event related fees). With Slate Payments you can collect payments within a form using a payment widget. The payment widget adds the option of charging payments for a dataset record as well as a person or application record.

We continually enhance the capabilities of Slate Payments. Some new and upcoming Slate Payment features include:

• Additional in-person Card-present / MOTO capabilities

• Self-service discovery of refund reference IDs (available now)

• Enhanced scheduled and recurring payment options

• Payment plans beyond the Advancement-lifecycle use cases of recurring donations

Slate Payments generally has lower fees than the external payment processors that an organization may be using. It supports the greatest diversity of payment methods, provides the most robust international support, and provides the most direct integration with Slate. If you need to capture payments directly on a form or for any event, Slate Payments is the right tool for the job.

✨ Since 2017, Slate Payments has processed over $1.25 billion in total payment volume. Stripe launched in 2011 and has proven to be a stable, highly scalable and innovative payments platform. For the calendar year 2023, roughly 1% of global GDP passed through Stripe businesses: more than $1 trillion in total payment volume.

Benefits of Slate Payments:

• Collect payments directly on a form or event.

• Competitive costs:

  • For US-based merchants: a processing fee of 2.3% plus $0.30 per Credit card transaction (across the board, including American Express).

  • For a United States-based institution, transaction fees are the same for credit cards originating in any country!

  • ACH payments (US bank accounts only), a fee of $0.25/per transaction + a fee of $1.00 per one-time payment for NACHA required ACH bank validation plus verification.

• Automatically displays all acceptable, available, and supported payment methods for the payer’s location and device with Stripe’s payment element (e.g. card brands and payment wallets that may be popular in that part of the world from which the payer accesses Slate-based pages)

• Manage refunds directly inside Slate. Refunds can be initiated from the payment activity or payment history payment records.

• Flexibility for “payouts”: e.g. direct ‘course fee’ payments and deposits to different external bank accounts on a different schedule.

• Built-in reconciliation reporting with the option of creating additional custom payment-based reports/queries using familiar Slate functionality. These can be turned into scheduled exports to update your ERP/SIS via FTP or web-services.

• Self-service setup and easy-to-use testing mode.

• Easily enable or disable ACH and credit cards by payment account prompt value (that is, any custom fee type you define in Slate).

• Tap-to-pay using the Slate mobile app. Accept contactless credit or debit cards, Apple Pay, Apple Watch, and smartphones with other digital wallets on your mobile device without extra hardware.

📖 Further reading:

• Slate Payments

• Manage refunds in Slate

• Flexibility for “payouts”

• Self-service setup and testing

• Tap-to-pay

External payment processors

If your organizational policies prevent the use of Slate Payments, external payment processors or gateways can often be integrated with Slate to enable online payments collection and to update Slate records accordingly.

Limitations of External Payment Processors

• Cannot be used to capture payments directly on a form/event via the payment widget.

• Refunds for payments made through an external processor facilitated via Slate must be initiated, processed, and tracked using the external processor's system. These transactions are not transmitted back to Slate, and therefore will not be reflected in the payment history (or the record). You need to manually add payment refunded activities or interactions to the relevant records, if refunds have to tracked.

• Setting up external payment processors is not self-service and requires a longer timeline due to the custom set up and testing that is required for each integration. Clients must submit a ticket through the Support Desk Ticket—the average time-frame being 4-6 weeks.

• Requires clients to build their own custom reconciliation reporting.

• In-person payments via Payment Terminal / tap-to-pay is only available for Slate Payments. If using an external processor, you will not be able to accept payments from contactless credit or debit cards, Apple Pay, Apple Watch, and smartphones with other digital wallets within the Slate mobile app.

📖 Further reading: External Payment Processors

Charging payments in Slate using interactions and activities

The standard way to ‘charge payments’ is to add Payment Due interactions or activities to a person or application record indicating that an amount is due (currently payments can not be charged in this way for any other type of record). This process will be the same for all types of payment processing. This usually will happen as a result of a payment rule. Alternatively, payment amounts can be calculated and Payment Due activities added using a form payment widget.

The presence of a payment due activity creates a unique payment link. The payment page that is generated can be shared with others, such as relatives of an applicant, to allow them to make payments on the applicant's behalf.

🔔 Important! Payments do not function independently: they must be attached to a record, such as a person record, an applicant record, or a dataset record.

📖 Further reading: Charging Payments in Slate Using Interactions and Activities

Security and Compliance

Slate uses encrypted transmission at all times, follows best-practice security, and is PCI compliant. We do not store or persist any protected information such as credit card numbers. All payment transactions support TLS version 1.2 and will block TLS 1.0.

For additional information and certification of compliance, see Slate Security Profile and Documentation (article requires login).

Using Flywire for payments in local currency

This specific use case is an example of using additional payment accounts to route payments to different vendors. Flywire offers a product that enables an international payer to access available local currency payment methods.

📖 Further reading: Using Flywire for International Payment Processing

Troubleshooting payment issues

See Troubleshooting Payment Issues for help when payments aren't behaving as expected.

Viewing and querying payment data

Whether using Slate Payments or an external processor, you can query and export payment data in Slate.