4 months ago
Written by Tim, discussed by
no one
We’ve just last week made our billing operational so can take credit card payments and you can manage your PlanHQ account from within your plan, view your past invoices and upgrade/downgrade your account.
I know some of you probably hoped you’d be on a free trial forever, but we figured PlanHQ should start making some money as well as spending it. And it really is nice to see people move from trial users to happy paying customers. Thanks to the first round of customers who have and are signing up, we got our first credit card just a few minutes after emailing everyone from Thomas Stokell who said “Number 1 Customer, Stoked!”
Automated Secure Billing
Taking credit cards online can take quite a bit of setup, and its something you always want to get just right. We’ve built plenty of ecommerce sites before, but with PlanHQ we basically had to build an automated recurring billing engine, which is working great. But theres also getting the merchant account active and plugging into a secure payment gateway who manage the payment and hold your credit card details. If you live in the US the second two of these things are pretty quick to setup, but it usually takes a bit longer in New Zealand and you really rely on the providers pulling through if you want it done quickly.
Online Credit Card Processing
While there are several banks that offer internet merchant accounts, in New Zealand only BNZ currently provide $USD merchant accounts. BNZ broke all the records for us and had our internet merchant account taking $USD’s in 3 working days and our payment gateway provider DPS followed up with a 5 hour turnaround to activate us on the payment gateway so we were up and running exactly when we scheduled.
Very nice work here guys, thanks Amy Huang from the BNZ for pushing things through, and the crew at DPS. It’s been all pluses on the banking front recently, ANZ have been great at quickly approving a loan for working capital over the phone and our new bank ASB for PlanHQ got us up and rocking with accounts and had a $NZD merchant account ready to go in less than 24 hours, thanks Andi.