Payments In

The two most common ways payments are sent to May First:

Stripe

We have an account with the company Stripe that has a dashboard showing all transactions.

We collect money this way:

  • Donation page - which has an embedded form for people to enter their credit card. These are entered with the financial type “Donation”.

  • Membership payment page - which directs people to the external “Stripe Checkout” Page. These payments are entered with the financial type “Member Dues”. On Stripe checkout they have many options to pay, including:

    • Credit Card
    • ACH (US bank transfer)
    • ApplePay or GooglePay

PayPal

We can log into our PayPal account as well.

Other Details

Please see our refunds document to learn how to refund over payments made via credit card or PayPal.

Both Credit card and PayPal payments are (typically) automatically applied to member records in CiviCRM (or automatically applied as donations in CiviCRM) and automatically imported into our GnuCash accounting software. No action is required on our part for these payments.

Except… Some people try to pay their dues via our membership system but it doesn’t work. See the one off credit card renewals page for information on how to handle that situation.

Additional methods to pay us:

  • Checks - Some members mail checks our to virtual postal mail address. These should be deposited to CitiBank via a Virtual Postal Mail check deposit request and applied to the correct membership (see the CiviCRM page for more details).

    Once entered into CiviCRM, they will be automatically imported into GnuCash.

    Sometimes we are paid for special projects via check, in which case they must be entered direclty into our accounting software (see GnuCash).

  • EFT - Some payments come via Electronic Funds Transfer - directly into our checking account. Some international members request or SWIFT code to make this transfer. These must be manually entered into CiviCRM if they are membership related (and from there they will be automatically entered into GnuCash). Or, if they are not member-related, they must be manually entered into GnuCash.

  • Bill.com - Some members use the bill.com site to send us payments. We have an account that automatically moves money sent to us via bill.com into our checking account, so this method is similar to EFT. We generally get an email when a payment is made via bill.com, which is our signal to manually enter it into our CiviCRM database.

  • Barter - We don’t every barter for membership dues unless we request a service from a member and they would like to us to “pay” for that service in the form of their membership dues. We have a barter page that explains how to handle that.

So… where is the money?

When a payment is made via either PayPal or Stripe, the money goes to our account within Stripe and PayPal.

Stripe: We have an automatic transfer scheduled on the 15th of every month. On this day, all money collected via Stripe is transferred to our Citibank account.

PayPal: With PayPal we have an automatic transfer that happens at 1:00 am America/Los_Angeles (since our official address is in Covina, CA) on the first of the month. It will automatically transfer everything to Citibank, except $1300 so we have a minimum balance to pay bills.