Payment links

By the end you will have a working pay button on the invoices, reminders and PDFs you already send.

• Company Owners and Company Admins with access to Settings & Apps.
• The Elite plan, including Elite Early Bird and Enterprise. The 14-day Elite trial includes payment links as well.
• Every plan sees the Payment links tab. On a lower plan the tab shows an upgrade banner and the Connect buttons stay disabled.

Uku offers three ways to collect a payment, and they are not equal. A firm uses one of them at a time, so read the table before you connect anything.

Method	How you connect it	What it does
Stripe	One button. Uku opens Stripe, you confirm your details there, and there are no keys to copy.	Card payments. Uku marks the invoice paid on its own.
Montonio	Paste an Access Key and a Secret Key from your Montonio Partner System.	Bank links for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, in euros only. Uku marks the invoice paid on its own.
Custom link	Paste the address of a payment page you already use.	The client reaches your own page. Uku never marks the invoice paid.

Most firms should start with Stripe. Stripe needs nothing pasted and marks the invoice paid by itself.

While one method is connected the other two carry no Connect button, so switching means disconnecting first.

Path: Settings & Apps → Billing → Payment links

1. Click Connect on the Stripe row.
2. Fill in the details Stripe asks for in the window that opens. Stripe collects your company and bank details itself.
3. Return to Uku. The row shows Waiting for Stripe while Stripe checks your details, then Connected.

1. Open your Montonio Partner System and go to Stores → API access.
2. Copy the Access Key and the Secret Key.
3. In Uku, click Connect on the Montonio row.
4. Choose the Environment: Live for real payments, or Sandbox (testing) to try it first.
5. Paste both keys and click Save & test connection.

1. Click Connect on the Custom link row.
2. Type the address of your payment page in Link template.
3. Use the tags listed under the field to carry invoice data into the address: {invoice_id}, {invoice_number}, {amount} and {currency}.
4. Click Save & validate.

Click Disconnect on the connected row, then connect the one you want. While no method is connected, the invoices you send carry no pay link.

A connected payment method adds nothing to your invoices by itself. The {{payment_link}} placeholder is the only switch, and you put it in your own templates.

Path: Settings & Apps → Billing → Invoice templates

The placeholder is offered in four places:

• the invoice email template
• the three debt reminder templates
• the invoice PDF template, in Invoice templates and formatting
• the Invoice description field on a client’s contract settings

To add it:

1. Open the template you want to change.

2. Put the cursor where the payment link should appear.

3. Open the placeholder menu and choose Payment link, under Invoice.

4. Save the template.

The placeholder turns into different things on purpose. In an email it becomes a pay button, so give it its own line rather than wrapping it in a link of your own. On the PDF it becomes the plain web address, because paper cannot be clicked. Other billing placeholders are added the same way.

Leave the placeholder out of a template and that document carries no pay link at all. A placeholder left behind after a disconnect prints nothing, so it does no harm.

A connected payment method puts a button in front of nobody until the placeholder is in place, and nothing warns you. The Set up payment link checklist at the top of the Payment links tab answers that.

Each row is one place a pay link could appear:

• Client portal invoice view
• Payment link in email
• Payment link in PDF
• one row for each debt reminder you switched on

A tick means the link is there. An empty circle means the placeholder is still missing, and Set up on the row opens that template.

• A row is ticked only when every language of that template carries the placeholder. When one language is missing, the row names it. Clients who read that language never see a pay button.
• Reminder stages you switched off are left out of the list. A reminder that never sends cannot carry a link.
• The client portal row comes first and has no Set up link, because there is no template behind it.

• The full amount owing — Uku marks the invoice Paid on its own.
• Less than the amount owing — Uku records nothing and notifies your Company Owners. The invoice does not become part paid, and the link does not ask the client for the rest.
• More than the amount owing — Uku marks the invoice Paid and notifies your Company Owners. The difference has to be returned to the client outside Uku.
• The link always asks for the amount still owing, not the invoice total.
• With a custom link none of this happens. Mark the invoice paid yourself.

You do not have to email an invoice to give a client a pay link.

Path: Billing → Created or Sent → Copy pay link

1. Open Billing from the left navigation.
2. Go to the Created or the Sent tab, and select one invoice.
3. Click the three-dot menu in the selection toolbar, then click Copy pay link.
4. Paste the link into a message, a chat or an email of your own.

You can copy a link for one invoice at a time. Uku gives the same link every time, so a client who kept the first one can still use it.

Each invoice has one lasting web address, in the form https://app.getuku.com/pay/…. The link has no expiry date, so an invoice PDF forwarded weeks later still works. Uku checks at the moment of the click that the invoice still owes money.

• The page shows your company name, the invoice number, the amount, the currency and the due date. Line items and addresses are not shown.
• The page is in the language of the invoice.
• Your client does not log in to anything.
• After paying, the client lands on a receipt page, never on a second Pay button.
• A cancelled payment is not an error. The Pay button stays and nothing is charged.
• A link that no longer works shows a plain page and does not say why. The reason is your billing, and the payer has done nothing wrong.

A client signed in to the client portal sees a Pay button on any invoice that is still open and still owes money. A custom link opens in a new tab, so the portal stays behind it. A Stripe or Montonio link opens in the same tab, so the client lands on the receipt page.

The Pay button appears in the portal only when two things are true. The Client Portal must be set up with its own web address, and its menu must carry a visible row whose Link type is Invoices.

Open Settings & Apps → Billing → Payment links and read the Set up payment link checklist. A row with an empty circle means the placeholder is missing from that template. Click Set up on the row, add the Payment link placeholder, and save.

The placeholder is added for each language on its own. Open the template, switch to every language tab you use, and add the Payment link placeholder to each one. The checklist names the missing languages beside the row.

Stripe has paused payments on your account. Click Fix in Stripe and finish what Stripe asks for. Uku turns the connection back on by itself once Stripe is satisfied.

Check which method is connected. A custom link never marks an invoice paid, because Uku cannot see what happens on your own payment page. Mark the invoice paid yourself, or let your accounting integration do it. On Stripe and Montonio, check the amount: a payment smaller than the amount owing is never recorded, and your Company Owners were notified about it.

A link stops working when the invoice is paid, when the invoice is annulled, or when your Uku subscription has lapsed. Open the invoice in Uku and check its status. If money is still owed, use Copy pay link on the invoice and send the link again.

Clients reach an invoice in the portal only through a menu item of that kind. Open Settings & Apps → Client Portal → Menu links. Check that one row has Invoices as its Link type and that the row is visible. If no row does, set the Link type of a free row to Invoices and save. A row of that type needs no link target of its own.