We’re excited to introduce Multi-Party Payments, a new feature designed with inspectors in mind! With Multi-Party Payments, your clients can easily divide and complete payments from multiple parties, directly through the Spectora platform, without adding extra admin work for you. Multi-Party Payments is available exclusively to Spectora Payments users, helping you keep transactions simple, organized, and all in one place.
🔴 Multi-Party Payments is not compatible with Deferred Payments. If you have Deferred Payments enabled, you cannot use Multi-Party Payments.
How it Works
If you have Spectora Payments set up then Multi-Party Payments is an option for you to use! You do not have to enable this setting, it is automatically available.
Check out the video walk-through video below:
The Multi-Party Payment option shows in the Payments box on Inspection Details page.
Click "Add Invoice"
Select the person you want the separate invoice payment to go to from the Contact drop-down menu
Select the specific Service or add the Fixed Amount
Click the blue "Save" button
On the new Invoice click the option to "Send"
Preview the email and make any necessary changes then click "Send now" (here you can preview the invoice)
The email is sent only to the chosen party and they will receive a link to a separate payment portal to make the payment
✨ In order to assign a multi-party payment to a person i.e. Agents, Clients, Additional People, they must be a contact on the People Box on the inspection.
Updates with Multi-Party Payments
There will be a Payment Portal for multi-party payments, separate from the Client Portal. That way, whomever is paying that is not the Client won't have access to anything else, only the payment designated to them. The third party payer will receive their own separate invoice as well. Clients can see how much was paid and by who in the Client Portal when paying and on their invoice.
Since the payment portal is completely separate from the Client Portal, the only way third parties can view the Client Portal or the report(s) is if the inspector or company has an advanced automation set up to send to the persona type (i.e. Agents or any Additional People roles) or if the Client shares the link with the third party.
Multi-party payment(s) will show in the Fees and Payments box, just like other payments. Inspectors can also add manual line items, manual payments and issue refunds in the same box. Clicking the three dots icon on the new Payments box will give you access to the Fees & Payments:
Adding Additional People will be available for everyone across the software.
The Additional People feature is fully supported only when using Advanced Automations. Base Automations do not allow you to choose Additional People roles as email recipients, so any notifications for those contacts must be sent manually when using base automations.
Multi-Party Payment emails function separately from inspection automations. The Multi-Party Payment notifications are generated when a third-party invoice is created and are sent only to the person assigned to that payment. Multi-Party Payment emails will still be delivered to the appropriate additional payees because they operate as their own email process.
Inspectors can view the payments in their reporting and handle refunds as normal, so everything is handled on one platform.
🔴 You can only create separate invoices for charges that have not been paid. If the inspection is fully paid there won't be anything to invoice/split.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why am I seeing error message "Fixed amount cannot exceed $0.00" when trying to create a new invoice?
This is because you're trying to create an invoice for a fee that isn't due, which won't be possible. New/separate invoices can only be created for fees that have not yet been paid.
If you need to create a new charge on an inspection so that another party can submit payment, and you don't want the client to be notified that a charge was added:
Visit the inspection details page
Disable all notifications on the inspection before making any changes (to ensure the client isn't notified about a new fee added.)
Add the Service or Manual Fee to the inspection (in the "Services & Add Ons" box)
Note that when adding a service/fee to the inspection, you'll be offered an option to Update Agreements. If you need the client's agreement to re-generate with the new service/fee amount, you can click "update agreements." If this new fee does not need to be included on the agreement, simply click "Dismiss."
Uncheck "Disable all notifications" on the inspection to turn messaging back on.
Find the "Payments" box on the inspection details page and click "Add Invoice"
Select the contact, the service or fixed amount that this party will be paying, then hit "Save and Send" when you are ready to send the invoice.
If you have any questions or feedback, write into our chat bubble or email support@spectora.com!
