PayPal Payment Portal

PayPal as a payment gateway needs no introduction. It's a vastly popular solution for many business's and slews of your clients undoubtedly already have a PayPal account which would make submitting payment to you incredibly easy.

As mentioned on our general payment portal page, when payments are actually taken through PayPal, that is handled by PayPal. TimeTap does not store any of your client's credit card details or PayPal account information. This also means that all fees associated with credit card processing are taken by PayPal. We (TimeTap) do not take any additional fees on top of what PayPal takes.

To integrate your PayPal account with TimeTap, you first need to make sure that your PayPal account is established as either a Business account or a Premier account. To learn about the difference between the two PayPal account types, please read PayPal's documentation on it. You'll need to have one of these two types of accounts because you need a "Merchant Account ID" in order to link your PayPal account to TimeTap, and PayPal's basic "Personal" account does not have a Merchant Account ID associated with it.

If you want to take deposits for your services and/or classes on your TimeTap account, then you'll need to choose the Business account type. This is because the option to allow for multiple payments on a single invoice (which would be the deposit amount and then the remaining balance at a later date) is only available as a feature in the Business account version. You'll find instructions on how to do this here.

Since there are some nuances to getting your PayPal account integrated to TimeTap, check out the links below for our documentation on how to get set up.

• How do I find my Merchant ID in my PayPal account?

• How do I allow for multiple payments on one invoice?

As always, if you still have any questions after reading through this documentation page, please reach out to our support team.

Your PayPal Merchant ID (sometimes called the Merchant Account ID) is stored in your business info section of your PayPal account. You will need this merchant account ID in order to link your TimeTap account to PayPal. When clients click to pay for their appointment, this ID will essentially tell PayPal which of their accounts we're trying to connect to.

PayPal has some documentation on how to find your Merchant Account ID available here. That link might be helpful if PayPal has changed their interface since I've written this documentation and moved where they store the Merchant Account ID.

We also have instructions on finding your Merchant Account ID, but if anything seems different in the screenshots below compared to when you login to your PayPal acconut, I recommend using the PayPal documentation link above to follow their guide (which they should keep up to date) on how to find your Merchant Account ID.

Finding your Merchant Account ID:

Login to PayPal and go to your "Profile" link in the top right and click on your "Profile and settings" menu option:

Open

Under your "My Profile" screen, make sure the "My business info" option is selected:

Open

You'll find your Merchant Account ID on that page. It is a 13 digit alphanumeric key. I have blurred some of mine out in the screenshot below since it is a live account, but I wanted to share the screenshot so you could see where it is on this screen:

If you accept deposits for your services or classes, then at some point in the future you'll want to allow clients to pay for the remaining balance on their invoice. By default, PayPal Business accounts do not allow you to have multiple payments on one invoice. This is to protect clients from accidentally paying for an invoice twice, but if you accept deposits then this is what you want.

Please note: If you have a PayPal Premium account type, you'll need to switch to a PayPal Business account in order to turn this feature on. At the time of writing this documentation (3/8/2016) this feature does not appear to be available to Premium account holders.

PayPal has many good qualities, but navigating through their settings can be a bit cryptic. They have documentation of their own on how to change this feature available here, or you can read on below to learn how to allow for multiple payments on a PayPal invoice.

To change this, login to PayPal, click on the "Profile" link in the top right and go to your "Profile and settings" menu option:

Under your "My Profile" screen, click the option for "My selling tools":

Under the My selling tools menu, click the "Update" link next to "Block payments" option under your "Getting paid and managing my risk" section:

This will take you to your Payment Receiving Preferences page where you'll see the "Block accidental payments" heading. Change that from "Yes, block multiple payments per invoice ID" to "No, allow multiple payments per invoice ID":

Finally, click the "Save" button at the bottom of the page and you should be all set to accept multiple payments on the same invoice: