I’m super new to Gravity Forms and I have quite a complicated system to build, so I’d love to get some advice from seasoned users.
The website I’m working on features a list of service providers. I am setting up Gravity Forms to gather the data and getting payment from the providers via Paypal. Then I’ll use Gravity View to display the directory of providers on the website. So far so good.
However, the fee is a yearly membership, so I also:
have to send these providers a yearly reminder to pay the membership via paypal;
several weeks later, send another reminder to those who haven’t paid with the first reminder
at the end of the membership payment period (May 1 every year), have a clear record of who’s paid and not in order to send the first to the accountant, and to remove the latter from the directory on the site.
I guess I need a (SIMPLE!) mailing add-on (no crazy or complicated design necessary), and a (SIMPLE!) accounting add-on - maybe something that can be exported to CSV. Do you have anything to recommend?
Sending reminders for making a payment is not a feature of Gravity Forms, but if you really need to do things using reminders, there’s a third-party add-on that maybe could fit your needs.
Said that, I think it would be a better approach to use built-in features in the PayPal add-on and Gravity Forms to create a yearly automatic charge:
Create Subscription feed type for PayPal, that would take care automatically of the first and later payments without requiring reminders. This way once the user submits the form, a subscription is created in PayPal and PayPal will charge the user automatically each year.
Using 1, you can add additional notifications to your form settings and configure them using the Event setting to send a notification to your accountant when a payment is completed, or failed or the subscription is cancelled… There’s no limit in the number of notifications that you can add to the form, so you’re free to add one for each event of your interest.
You would be able also to configure notifications based on single payment submission events, but honestly I can’t see any benefit in using reminders to ask users for payments manually when you can create yearly subscriptions to take care of payments automatically.
I would love to set up the automatic renewals, unfortunately it’s not the kind of business and members who would trust that kind of service. I’m even expecting a lot of resistance with Paypal itself, and probably most members will pay by check and I’ll have to manually enter in the system that the payments have been done. Which is why it’s really important to have a solid backend accounting/record keeping system.
