Can't Enter Payment Details for a Manual Order

[marke]

Just upgraded a site to v9. Everything seemed to go OK. I have sold something on Ebay this morning. Usually when we do this I then put the order through Actinic as a manual order. Payment is almost always by Paypal and up til now I have always just gone into the order, selected Paypal as the payment option and then entered the Paypal payment ref. When I entered the order this morning in V9 I could find no way of selecting Paypal as my payment option. When I looked in business settings I can see that the Paypal option has been blanked out for desktop payments. Is there any way I can enter a manual order and use paypal as the payment option? All I want to do is enter an order manually, select the payment method as Paypal and enter the Paypal payment ref. This was possible in version 8 and before but unless I am missing somthing this functionality has been removed in V9. Could somone from Actinic confirm whether this is correct or not. Maybe something went wrong with my upgrade???

[TraceyHand]

I've complained about this too, Mark, when I noticed it in the BETA.
It is working as designed *sigh* and apparently you can't have a payment option available for both online AND offline use (which is just silly, IMO)

I was recommended to use the 'Credit Card Details Sent Separately' option for these orders but I think that appears misleading on the invoices.

I still think this is a move in the wrong direction because some of these payment methods SHOULD be available offline too.

[marke]

I agree, this is a silly change and actually something which wil steer me back to v8 before I to entrenched in v9.
As you mentioned, I could set up another payment option and use credit card details sent seperatly but as you say this will introduce the chance of confusion on the part of the customer. It also means that I have to reconfig actinic link and line 50 which is a hassle. It also means that when we do our financial reconsiliations I am reconciling Paypal payments with paypal account and also another form of payment with the paypal account. Not sure my auditors will like that.
What I can do is place an order over the website with the customers details, choose to pay by paypal and abandon the cart as soon as it forwards to paypal. This allows me to bring the order into the payment pending tab where I can edit the order and enter the info I want.

[markburley]

Although I have yet to upgrade, I also beleive that it is a backward step. PayPal should be recorded as PayPal - not as credit card payments.

If a PayPal payment is pending is it therefore not possible to enter the payment against the order when it is confirmed?

We deal with the PayPal payments in Quickbooks 2008 differently to payments by credit card - as the interface does not work it is important to see on the Data Entry report which method was used - this will make an already time consuming task even worse!

[TraceyHand]

What I can do is place an order over the website with the customers details, choose to pay by paypal and abandon the cart as soon as it forwards to paypal. This allows me to bring the order into the payment pending tab where I can edit the order and enter the info I want.

true, I suppose you could!
My problem is that the payment method I'm using that I now can't use in V9 isn't Paypal, it's Google checkout which I enter as manual offline orders..except now I don't have the payment method to use and can't do it online in the same way.

I'd like to know why the change has been made, tbh. Even my imported snapshot from V8 hasn't carried over my old payment method of GC (which was only available for offline orders) so I can't use it as already being there.

I'd like to see a facility whereby WE can choose exactly what payment methods are available offline and NOT Actinic

[TraceyHand]

ok..I just sussed out how to add an offline payment method

Business Settings > Payments

Add a line by clicking the + at the top left and scroll down to ANY payment method that
a) you don't currently use and are not likely to need and
b) Comes up with the Web and Desktop checkboxes checked (I used "Payment on Account")

Change the Name to whatever you need..and untick the Website box if it only needs to be used offline (in our cases, it would)

I'm not sure how this would work when you're linking it with other software, it'd need reconfiguring, I suppose but at least the outcome would be that you have the correct payment method showing both in the offline order forms and on invoices etc

[cbarling]

I've just done some playing around with this and I can see the problem. The difficulty with the work-around of using a different payment method and renaming it to, say, "Paypal" is that the system still uses the original description in various customer communications, which, as has been said, is confusing for the customer.

I'm afraid that this one is an example of the law of unintended consequences. The intention was to provide better control over payment methods, so you could specify exactly what payment method were allowed for ecommerce (web) and for MOTO/CNP orders. The intention wasn't to stop perfectly valid use - we just didn't realise that these methods were used as has been described in this thread.


Here's the work-around:
- Close Actinic
- open up the ActinicCatalog.mdb database in the Site1 (or whatever) folder (you need Access installed on your PC)
- open the table PaymentMethods
- set the field bAvailableOffline to -1 for every payment method that you want to allow to be used offline and currently can't
- close the database
- open Actinic and enable the method

The same change will be made in a future maintenance release.

Chris

[TraceyHand]

Chris, thanks..that certainly solves the Paypal problem, great stuff.
I hadn't looked in that table in V9 yet.
The payment method does appear correctly on the invoices the way I added it (I'm still having to do this for my GC paid orders) but I noticed that it doesn't on customer emails.
Interestingly, in uses "Invoice and payment before delivery" which isn't even the method I've configured to use.
I've used "payment on account" and, in V8, I used "cash on delivery" yet both show on customer emails as "Invoice & Payment Before Delivery" which is obviously not correct.


ANyway, for the few orders it affects, I can edit that. As long as I can get the methods working offline and appearing correctly on invoices, I'm good to go so thanks for that workaround.

[zmagyar]

The problem with the method name used in the emails is being investigated. Due to the release schedules the fix may not get in the next maintenance release. But it should be fixed soon. I hope this also helps some way.

[TraceyHand]

Thanks, Zoltan
It's good to know it's being looked into
:-)