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Paying by bank transfer

invoicingaccount-and-billing
Paying by bank transfer

Plenty of clients will never type a card number into a booking page. Corporate accounts pay on invoice by transfer, and a transfer costs you no processing fee, so it deserves to be a proper option rather than something buried under the card button. 1pm gives bank transfer its own panel on the documents your clients see, lets them tell you what they are sending, and lets them raise the invoice their accounts team needs without waiting on you.

This article covers setting up your bank details, where they appear, what your client can do on the confirmation, and what lands on your side when they do it.

Setting up your bank details

Go to Account, then Tax & invoicing, and fill in the payment instructions. It is one free-text box, so put in whatever your region actually uses: BSB and account number, sort code, routing number, IBAN and SWIFT, and the account name.

It is a single field on purpose. Bank details are shaped differently in every country, so a set of fixed columns would either be wrong for half the world or would need validating country by country for something that is only ever displayed.

Until this is filled in, bank transfer is not offered anywhere. If you also have no card payments connected, 1pm warns you on the confirmation that your client has no way to pay at all, rather than letting you send it and wonder why nothing happens.

Where the details appear

Your instructions render as a labelled How to pay panel on the document itself, on screen, in print, and in the PDF. The document number goes on as the payment reference automatically, so a transfer arrives with something you can reconcile against.

The panel is deliberately narrow in scope. It shows only on a document that is genuinely payable and still owes money, which means invoices and confirmations. A quote is not payable, so it never carries your account details, and a settled invoice drops the panel rather than inviting a second payment.

What your client sees on the confirmation

On a signed confirmation, the pay step reads Secure your booking with two panels side by side: pay online by card via Stripe, and pay by direct bank transfer. Both are always visible where both are available, neither is collapsed behind the other.

The transfer panel shows your account details, the payment reference, and then asks the client to tell you what they are sending.

Step one, the declaration. Depending on how the booking is staged, they choose "I'll pay the deposit by bank transfer" or "I'll pay in full by bank transfer", with the amount written on the button. That is the whole step. A client who just wanted your account details is not pushed a document they did not ask for.

Step two, the invoice, optional. Underneath, "I need an invoice. Generate an invoice" raises it for them. This is the corporate case: accounts will not release money without a formal document, and waiting on a human for that can stall a booking for a day. They get the stage-due invoice, a deposit invoice if the deposit is the amount owing, one full invoice if they elected to pay the lot. Ask twice and you get the same invoice, not a second one.

Once it exists, they can view, download or print it straight from the confirmation, and the "Invoice generated" automation emails it to them with the PDF attached.

There is one case where the client cannot self-serve: if you have a draft invoice sitting on that event, 1pm will not issue your work in progress on someone else's click. The client is told the invoice is on its way by email, and you get a notification to send it.

What you see

A declaration is a promise, not money, and 1pm is careful about the difference. It never touches the amount paid or the invoice status, and it gets its own notification type so the bell cannot read as "paid".

  • An intent badge appears on the confirmation and on the event's Billing page, in information blue rather than success green, saying what to expect. Hover it for the method and the date they declared it. It clears itself once the balance settles.
  • The record-payment form is prefilled with the declared amount and method, so when the transfer lands, reconciling it is one click.
  • The lead thread keeps the story. The choice is recorded in the client's own voice, "Chose to pay the deposit by direct bank transfer", and if they then generate an invoice, that goes in as a system entry with a link straight to it.

Nothing gates on the declaration. A client can declare a deposit and send the full amount, or declare and never send anything. It is there to tell you a transfer is in flight, which is the one thing a signed confirmation with no money against it could never tell you before.

Recording the payment when it arrives

Transfers land in your bank, not in 1pm, so the payment is one you record yourself. Open the confirmation or the invoice, record the payment against it, and the deposit, balance and outstanding figures update everywhere they appear.

If you are pushing invoices to Xero, note that payments post to a clearing account rather than straight to the bank, so your bank reconciliation stays yours to do. The Xero article covers the reasoning.

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