Letting customers pay online

There are two independent online payment methods: Stripe (cards) and PayPal. Connect one, both, or neither.

Stripe uses a guided Stripe Express Connect onboarding flow in Settings → Integrations. Payments go directly to your own Stripe account — nothing routes through an intermediary. Until onboarding is fully complete, no "Pay online" option is shown to your customers anywhere; that's checked server-side before the button renders, so nobody is ever offered a payment path that would fail.

PayPal works differently — you paste your own PayPal Client ID and Secret (sandbox or live) rather than going through an OAuth connect flow. An optional webhook ID adds a safety net for the rare case where a customer approves on PayPal but never returns to the invoice page. Every webhook delivery is verified against PayPal's own signature-verification API before anything is recorded.

Each method has a separate "show to customers" toggle, independent of whether it's connected — so you can temporarily hide one mid-setup or during a provider issue without disconnecting or losing credentials. This is enforced server-side: the checkout endpoints reject requests for a hidden method.

Once connected, every sent invoice includes a payment link, payments are recorded against the invoice automatically, and status updates without manual entry. The amount charged is always the invoice's current balance, computed fresh at checkout — accurate even if part was already paid by cash.