Schools In The US and Canada
The team will be reaching out to you to help get you set up to accept payments. Be on the look out for an email from the team with the application you must fill out to get started. It is recommend to complete these steps very quickly to ensure you can unlock other features in the platform that can start helping you make money right away.
Benefits of using our merchant
When it comes to merchant processors it can quickly become a nightmare for you when trying to find missing funds or something in reports is not matching up. The reason is because other merchants will only allow the school owner to talk to them and will not talk to us directly. This causes you to become the middle man and have to go back and forth between Spark and your Merchant. Most merchants simply point fingers at the CRM to avoid having to do the research and after a few days of frustration and going back and forth it comes out the discrepancy was on their end. We have seen some clients battle this for over 5 days before they can get an answer.
That is something that would never happen with Spark. Because we work closely with the merchant we are able to communicate with each other to figure out the issues or discrepancies and get them adjusted ASAP as we know how important your money is to you. We can have a solution or answer for you in a matter of a few hours compared to days without you having to lift a finger aside from providing us with details.
That alone is worth the switch to our merchant processor.
Schools In Any Other Country
If you are not in the US or Canada you will be able to use Stripe as the merchant processor. Stripe is a well known merchant that offers competitive fees. All you need to do is set up an account with them and send us your API keys to get connected.
Here is the website in case you need to contact them to find out what the fees are.
Processing EFTS, ACH's, and Bank Drafts
For EFTS, ACH's, and Bank Drafts we use Vericheck. Here is an article to review the fees.
Do You Still Want To Use Your Own Merchant?
If you have a merchant you love using you can continue collecting payments through them, but you will need to log the payments in Spark. We have an option for external billing company that records the payments, but it will require manual work to log each payment if you want to track it in Spark. Checkout pages wont work to collect payments either. Also, you will not be able to use the auto charge option or run payments in the point of sale.
Unfortunately, we cannot connect with any other merchant processor at this moment, but we understand if you don't want to leave your merchant. We offer the external billing option.