Online Payments & Stripe

Go to Settings > Accounting and find Card Payments (Stripe). Connecting takes you through Stripe's own hosted onboarding (a Standard Connect account) — only an admin can start this. Once complete, payments your clients make land directly in your own independent Stripe account, not a Landscapt-controlled one. “Manage on Stripe” simply opens your normal Stripe Dashboard — it's your account in every sense, Landscapt is never the merchant of record and never touches the funds.

Already have a Stripe account (for example one you use with another system)? Until you're connected, the same Card Payments card shows Connect your existing account. It sends you to Stripe to approve the link, then returns you to Settings > Accounting. The account stays yours and keeps working everywhere else. Only an admin can do this, one Stripe account can be connected to one Landscapt organization only, and if you reconnect a different account, cards clients saved on the old one are cleared and need to be re-saved.

Bring over cards your customers already saved. Once your existing account is connected, Settings > Accounting shows Import saved cards from Stripe. Click Find saved cards and Landscapt reads your Stripe customers and proposes matches to your clients. Email matches start checked, name-only matches start unchecked, and expired cards can't be selected. Nothing changes until you confirm, existing saved methods are never overwritten, and Turn on autopay for imported methods is off by default, so turn it on only for clients who already agreed to autopay.

Payment happens through an embedded Stripe form on the page itself — there's no redirect to a separate Stripe-hosted checkout page.

For the client-facing portal experience in more detail — Outstanding vs. History, one-click Pay Now, and the saved-method management flow — see the Client Portal guide's Billing section; this page focuses on the payments plumbing behind it.

Once a payment succeeds, Stripe notifies the app automatically (a webhook, not a page refresh) — the invoice's paid amount and balance update, its status moves to Paid or Partial, a payment record is created, the client's running balance is recalculated, and it's logged to the client's activity timeline. If you have an Invoice Paid automation configured, it fires at this point too.

Landscapt takes zero cut of any client payment — every charge is a direct charge straight to your own connected Stripe account. What you see charged is entirely a fee you configure, in Settings > Accounting, to help cover Stripe's own card-processing rate:

• Off by default for new companies. When you turn it on you set the rate (3% is the starting value) and the threshold above which it applies — for example 3% on card payments over $500.
• Choose Flat percent or Cover the card fee exactly. Stripe's fee is taken from the whole charge, including the surcharge, so a flat percent can leave you slightly short; the cover-the-fee mode grosses the charge up so you receive the full invoice amount. The cover-the-fee surcharge is capped at 4% of the balance, so on a very small balance you net slightly less than the invoice.
• Refunds return the surcharge too. A full refund returns the processing fee the client paid; a partial refund returns the fee's matching share. Your books still show the refund against the invoice amount.
• Card networks cap surcharges (at 3%) and some states ban them. A flat rate is whatever you set, so keep it lawful where you operate. Cover the card fee mode is capped at 4%, which can still exceed the 3% network cap on small invoices, so use a flat rate of 3% or less if you are in doubt. Surcharges apply to credit cards only, never debit or prepaid cards. Payments are authorized first and captured with the fee; if the payment_intent.amount_capturable_updated webhook event isn't subscribed in Stripe, a surcharged payment can take 5–7 minutes to record instead of seconds.
• Applies to card payments on invoices and to a deposit paid by card when a client accepts a proposal, on the same threshold.
• Never applied to Bank Transfer/ACH payments — ACH is fee-free by design.
• Credit cards only. Debit and prepaid cards can't be surcharged. A saved card (autopay, Charge All) is checked first and a debit, prepaid or unreadable card is charged the invoice amount with no fee. A card entered at checkout shows the fee beforehand, labelled “credit cards only”; the payment is authorized for the total, and as soon as the card is on it Landscapt captures the full amount for a credit card or just the invoice balance for a debit or prepaid card, releasing the fee part of the hold. The payment shows as recorded within seconds (at most a few minutes). If the card type can't be read, no fee is charged.
• Staff can waive it or override it to a flat amount on an individual charge; clients paying through the portal or a public pay link cannot.
• Every fee collected is itemized in its own “Credit Card Processing Fees” report and rolled into the P&L.

Because a Standard Connect account is your own fully independent Stripe account, Stripe sends the app a signed notification any time something happens on it — but the app also double-checks that notification actually belongs to your org's connected account before trusting any of the invoice/client information inside it, closing off a class of cross-tenant spoofing that a naive integration would be exposed to. Every payment notification is also deduplicated, so a retried delivery can't double-apply the same payment twice.

If a client opens the same pay link or portal page on two devices and both payments genuinely go through, the second one isn't silently lost or double-applied to the invoice — the system applies only what's actually still owed at settlement time and records the rest as a credit toward that client's future invoices. It can't undo a real duplicate charge on the client's card (that's a refund conversation), but it keeps your books honest either way.

• Stripe's own ACH toggle isn't enough on its own — see the ACH callout above. This is the single most common reason “Bank Transfer” doesn't show up for a client who should have it.
• A refund is a real Stripe refund, not just a bookkeeping flip — issuing one from inside the app actually returns the client's money through Stripe first, then updates the invoice record once Stripe confirms it went through.
• Proposal deposits are charged here too. An estimate with a Deposit Required amount can take it by card as part of the client accepting the proposal. It runs through the same connected account as everything else — card or bank transfer, with your card processing fee applying above its usual threshold — but because it happens before any invoice exists it's recorded as an unapplied prepayment rather than against a balance. The invoice screen prompts you to apply it, with a one-click Apply to this invoice button whenever a client has unapplied money. See the Estimating guide. The other deposit methods on that page charge nothing.
• A failed deposit doesn't un-accept the proposal. A bank transfer can be returned days after the client accepted, and a card can be declined. When that happens the acceptance stands — only the payment failed — and the estimate records the reason the bank or card network gave. You get a Deposit failed notification and email, and the client's original proposal link re-opens itself so they can pay it again from the same link. It closes as soon as a deposit is recorded.
• A refund comes out of unapplied credit before it comes off an invoice. When a payment is larger than what it was applied to — an overpayment, or a prepayment only partly used — the leftover sits on the payment as unapplied credit. Refunding now consumes that credit first and only reaches into the invoices once it runs out. So refunding a $50 overpayment on a paid $100 invoice returns the $50 and leaves the invoice paid; it no longer reopens a settled invoice and pushes it back into the charge queue. Refund more than the unapplied amount and the remainder is taken back off the invoices proportionally, as before.
• Client credit is used before the card is charged. Any deposit, prepayment or overpayment the client already holds is applied to the invoice first, and only the remainder goes to the card or bank. If credit covers the whole invoice, no card is charged and you'll see “paid from client credit” instead of a charge amount. Credit is applied only after every other check passes, so a charge that is refused (no saved method, a debit still settling) never changes the invoice.
• A returned bank debit can be charged again. If an ACH payment bounces after it was recorded, the invoice reopens and can be charged again right away. The duplicate-charge guard only blocks debits that are still in flight or not yet recorded.
• Fee waivers and overrides are staff-only. A client paying through their portal or a public link always sees the standard configured fee — they can't adjust or skip it themselves.

• Charge asks first. Clicking Charge on an invoice in the Invoices list shows the client, amount, invoice number and saved card before anything is charged.
• Debit cards are card payments. Payments recorded as “Debit Card - Visa” and similar count with credit card payments in the payment-method and Credit Card Charges reports.
• Refunds don't trigger “payment failed” automations. Only a real failure or bank return of an ACH payment fires the failed-charge automation. A refund you issue, here or in Stripe, does not.
• Payments in flight. While a card authorization or bank debit is pending, the invoice is marked as having a payment in progress and is left out of Charge All, so it isn't charged twice.
• Changing Stripe accounts. If a payment that was already under way lands on your previous Stripe account after you connect a new one, Landscapt tells your admins once so it can be recorded by hand.